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DE PROFUNDIS

DE PROFUNDIS

BY

OSCAR WILDE

METHUEN & CO. LTD.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

Thirty First Edition

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stack
Annex

CONTENTS

FAGB

A PREFATORY DEDICATION TO DR. MAX

MEYERFELD, BY THE EDITOR . . . ix

FOUR LETTERS WRITTEN FROM READING

PRISON 1

DE PBOFUNDIS, WITH ADDITIONAL MATTER 81

TWO LETTERS TO THE DAILY CHRONICLE

ON PRISON LIFE ...... ISS

tU

A PREFATORY DEDICATION^

Ti/fY Dear Dr. Meyerfeld, — It is a great
•^ ' '*■ pleasure to dedicate this new edition of
De Profundis to yourself. But for you I do not
think the hook would have ever been published.
When first you asked me about the manuscript which
you heard Wilde wrote in prison, I explained to you
vaguely that some day I hoped to issue portions of
it, in accordance with the writer's wishes ; though I
thought it would be premature to do so at that
moment. You begged, however, that Germany (which
already held Wilde's plays in the highest esteem)
should have the opportimity of seeing a new work
by one of her favourite authors. I rather re-
luctantly consented to your proposal ; and promised^
at a leisured opportunity, to extract such portions of
the work as ?mgIU be considered of general public
interest. I fear that I postponed what was to me a

^ First included in Thirteenth Edition for the volume of
uniform works in 14 vols.

ix

Z PREFATORY

rather painful task ; it tvas only your visits and more
importunate correspondence (of which frankly I
began to hate the sight) that brought about the
fulfilment of your object. There tvas no idea of
issuing the work in England ; but after despatching
to you a copy for translation in Die Neue
Rundschau, it occurred to me that a simultaneous
publication of the original might gratify Wilde^s
English friends and admirers who Iiad expressed
curiosity on the subject. The decision mas not
reached without some misgiving, for reasons which
need only be touched upon here, Wilde's name un-
fortunately did not bring very agreeable memories
to English ears : his literary position, hardly recog-
nised even in the zenith of his successful dramatic
career, had come to be ignored by Mr. Ruskin's
countrymen, unable to separate the man and the
artist; how rightly or wrongly it is not for me to
say. In Germany and France, where tolerance and
literary enthusiasm are more widely distributed,
Wilde's works were judged independently of the.
author's career. Salom6, prohibited by the English
censor in the author's lifetime, had become part of
the repertoire of the European stage, long before

DEDICATION si

thaljinest of all his dramas inspired the great opera
of Dr. Strauss; whilst the others^ performed
occasionally in the English provinces without his
name, were still banned in the London theatres.
His great intellectual endowments were either denied
or forgotten. Wilde (who in De Profundis ex-
aggerates his lost contemporary position in England
and shows no idea of his future European reputation)
gauges fairly accurately the nadir he had reached
when he says that his name was become a synonym
for folly.

In sending copy to Messrs. Methuen (to whom
alone I submitted it) I anticipated refusal, as though
the work were my own. A very distinguished man
of letters who acted as their reader advised, however,
its acceptance, and urged, in view of the uncertainty
of its reception, the excision of certain passages, to
which I readily assented. Since there has been a
demand to see these passages, already issued in
German, they are here replaced along with others of
minor importance. I have added besides some of
those letters written to me from Reading, which
though they were brought out by you in Germany, I

xii PREFATORY

did not, at first, contemplate publishing in this
country. They illustrate Wilde's varying moods in
prison. Owing to a foolish error in transcription,
I sent you these letters with wrong dates — dates of
other unpublished letters. The error is here rectified.
By the courtesy of the editor and the proprietors of
the Daily Clironicle / have included the two re-
markable contributions to their paper on the subject
of prison life : these and The Ballad of Reading
Gaol being all that Wilde wrote after his release,
other than private correspondence. The generous
reception accorded to De Profundis has justified
the preparation of a new and fuller edition. The
most sanguine hopes have been realised; English
critics have shown themselves ready to estimate the
writer, whether favourably or unfavourably, without
emphasising their natural prejudice against his later
career, even in reference to this book where the two
things occasion synchronous comment. The work
has met of course with some severe criticisms, chiefly
from 'narrow natures and hectic-brains.'

But in justice to the author and myself there are
two points which I ought to make clear: the title
De Profundis, against which some have cavilled, is,

DEDICATION xiii

as you tvill remember from our correspondence, my
onm ; for this I do not make any apology. Then,
certain people (among others a well-known French
writer) have paid jne the compliment of suggesting
that the text was an entire forgery by myself or
a cento of Wilde's tellers to myself Were I
capable either of the requisite art, or the requisite
fraud, I should have made a name in literature ere
now. I need say here only that De Profundis is a
manuscript of eighty close-written pages on twenty
folio sheets ; that it is cast in the form of a letter to
a friend not myself j that it was written at intervals
during the last six months of the author s imprison-
ment on blue stamped prison foolscap paper. Re-
ference to it and directions in regard to it occur in
the letters addressed to myself and printed in this
volume. Wilde handed me the document on the day
of his release ; he was not allowed to send it to me
from prison. With the exception of Major Nelson,
then Governor of Reading Gaol, myself, and a
confidential typewriter, no one has read the whole of
it. Contrary to a general impression, it contains
nothing scandalous. There is no definite scheme or
plan in the work ; as he proceeded the writer's inten-

xir PREFATORY

tion obviously and constantly changed ; it is de-
sultory; a large portion of it is taken up milh
business arid private mailers of no interest whatever.
The manuscript has, however, been seen and
authenticated by yourself, by Mr. Methuen, and by
Mr. Hamilton Fyfe, when editor of the Daily
Mirror, where a leaf of it was facsimiled.

Editorial egoism has led me to make tJds intro-
duction longer than was intended, but I must answer
one question: both you and other friends have
asked why I do not write any life of Wilde. I can
give you two reasons : I am not capable of doing
so ; and Mr. Robert Sherard has ably supplied the
deficiency. Mr. Sherard's book contains all the
important facts of his career; the errors are of
minor importaTicCt except in regard to certain
gallant exaggerations about myself. His view of
Wilde, however, is not MT view, especially in
reference to the author's unhappiness after his
release. That Wilde suffered at times from extreme
poverty and intensely from social ostracism I know
very well; but his temperament was essentially a
happy one, and I think his good spirits and enjoy-
ment of life far outweighed any bitter recollections

DEDICATION X?

or realisation of an equivocal and tragic position.
No doubt he felt the latter keenly, but he concealed
his feeling as a general rule, and his manifestations
of it lasted 07ily a very few days. He was, however,
a man with many facets to his character; and he
left in regard to that character, and to his attain-
ments, both before and after his downfall, curiously
different impressioTis on professing judges of
their fellowmen. To give the whole man would
require the art of Boswell, Purcell or Robert
Browning. My friend Mr. Sherard will, J think,
claim only the biographical genius of Dr. Johnson;
and I, scarcely the talent of Theophrastus. — Believe
me, dear Dr. Meyerfeld, yours very truly,

Robert Ross
Reform Club

August Qlst, 1907

LETTERS FROM READING PRISON

Letter T

10th March 1896.

MY Dear RonuiE, — I waiit you to have a
letter written at once to Mr. the

solicitor, stating that as my wife has promised to
settle a third on me, in the case of her prede-
ceasing me, I do not wish any opposition to be
made to her purchasing my life interest. I feel
that I have brought such unhappiness on her,
and such ruin on my children, that I have no
right to go against her wishes in anything. She
was gentle and good to me here, when she came
to see me. I have full trust in her. Please
have this done at once, and thank my friends
for their kindness. I feel I am acting rightly
leaving this to my wife.

Please write to Stuart Merrill in Paris, or
Robert Sherard, to say how gratified I was at the
performance of my play, and have my thanks

2 LETTERS FROM READING PRISON

conveyed to Lugne-Poe:* it is something that
at a time of disgrace and shame I should be still
regarded as an artist : I wish I could feel more
pleasure, but I seem dead to all emotions except
those of anguish and despair. However, please
let Lugne-Poe know that I am sensible of the
honour he has done me. He is a poet himself.
I fear you will find it difficult to read this, but
as I am not allowed writing materials I seem to
have forgotten how to write — you must excuse
me. Thank More for exerting himself for
books; unluckily I suffer from headaches when
I read my Greek and Roman poets — so they
have not been of much use — but his kindness
was great in getting the set. Ask him to
express my gratitude to the lady who lives at
Wimbledon. Write to me please in answer to
(this, and tell me about literature, what new
books, etc. — also Jones's play and Forbes-
Robertson's management : — about any new
tendency in the stage of Paris or London. Also
try and see what Lemaftre, Bauer, and Sarcey

1 The first impersonator of Herod and first producer of
Saiomi io Paris. 1896.

LETTERS FROM READING PRISON 3

said of Salom^, and give me a little resumi',

please write to Henri Bauer^ and say I am

touched at his writing nicely; Robert; Sherard

knows him. It was sweet of you to come and

see me You must come again next time.

Here I have the horror of death with the still

greater horror of living, and in silence and

misery. . . .

,1

I always remember you with deep affection.
I wish Ernest would get from Oakley Street
my portmanteau, fur coat, clothes, and the
books of my own writing which I gave my dear
mother — ask ... in whose name the burial
ground of my mother was taken.
Always your friend,

Oscar Wilde

Letter II

H.M. Prison, Readino,

after September 1896 [n.d.].

, . . To these purely business matters, per-

1 The hiatus here ia due to the scissors of Major Isacson,
then Governor of Reading Gaol. He was succeeded by
Major Nelson.

4 LETTERS FROM READING PRISON

haps More Adey will kindly reply. His letter
dealing purely with business, I shall be allowed
to receive. It will not, I mean, interfere with
your literary letter, with regard to which the
Governor has just now read me your kind
message.

For myself, my dear Robbie, I have little to
say that can please you. The refusal to com-
mute my sentence has been like a blow from
a leaden sword. I am dazed with a dull sense
of pain. I had fed on hope, and now anguish,
grown hungry, feeds her fill on me as though
she had been starved of her proper appetite.
There are, however, kinder elements in this
evil prison air than before : sympathies have
been shown to me, and I no longer feel entirely
isolated from humane influences, which was
before a source of terror and trouble to me.
And I read Dante, and make excerpts and
notes for the pleasure of using a pen and ink.
And it seems as if I were better in many ways,
and I am going to take up the study of German.
Indeed, prison seems to be the proper place for
such a study. There is a thorn, however — as

LETTERS FROM READING PRISON 5

bitter as that of St. Paul, though different — that
I must pluck out of ray flesh in this letter. It
is caused by a message you wrote on a piece of
paper for me to see. I feel that if I kept it
secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous
things grow in the dark) and take its place with
other terrible thoughts that gnaw me. . .
Thought, to those that sit alone and silent and
in bonds, being no 'winged living thing/ as
Plato feigned it, but a thing dead, breeding
what is horrible like a slime that shows monsters
to the moon.

I mean, of course, what you said about the
sympathies of others being estranged from me,
or in danger of being so, by the deep bitterness
of my feelings : and I believe that my letter
was lent and shown to others. . . . Now, I
don't like my letters shown about as curiosities :
it is most distasteful to me. I write to you
freely as to one of the dearest friends I have,
or have ever had: and, with a few exceptions,
the sympathy of others touches me, as far as its
loss goes, very little. No man of my position
can fall into the mire of life without getting a

6 LETTERS FROM READING PRISON

great deal of pity from his inferiors ; and I know
that when plays last too long, spectators tire.
My tragedy has lasted far too long; its climax
is over ; its end is mean ; and I am quite con-
scious of the fact that when the end does come
I shall return an unwelcome visitant to a world
that does not want me ; a revenant, as the French
say, and one whose face is grey with long im-
prisonment and crooked with pain. Horrible
as are the dead when they rise from their tombs,
the living who come out from tombs are more
horrible still. Of all this I am only too conscious.
When one has been for eighteen terrible months
in a prison cell, one sees things and people as
they really are. The sight turns one to stone.
Do not think that I woujd blame any one for my
vices. My friends had as little to do with them
as I had with theirs. Nature was in this matter
a stepmother to all of us. I blame them for not
appreciating the man they ruined. As long as
my table was red with wine and roses, what
did they care .-' My genius, my life as an artist,
my work, and the quiet I needed for it, were
nothing to them. I admit I lost my head. I

LETTERS FROM READING PRISON 7

was bewildered, incapable of judgment. I
made the one fatal step. And now I sit here
on a bench in a prison cell. In all tragedies
there is a grotesque element. You know the
grotesque element in mine. Do not think I do
not blame myself. I curse myself night and
day for my folly in allowing something to
dominate my life. If there was an echo in these
walls, it would cry 'Fool' for ever. I am
utterly ashamed of my friendships. . . . For by
their friendships men can be judged. It is a
test of every man. And I feel poignant abase-
ment of shame for my friendships ... of which
you may read a full account in my trial.

It is to me a daily source of mental humiliation.
Of some of them I never think. They trouble me
not. It is of no importance. . . . Indeed my
entire tragedy seems to be grotesque and
nothing else. For as a result of my having
suffered myself to be thrust into a trap ... in
the lowest mire of Malebolge, I sit between
Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade. In
certain places no one, except those actually
insane, is allowed to laugh : and indeed, even in

8 LErrERS FROM READING PRISON

their case, it is against the regulations for con-
duct : otherwise I think I would laugh at that.
, . . For the rest, do not let any one suppose
that I am crediting others with unworthy
motives. They really had no motives in life at
all. Motives are intellectual things. They had
passions merely, and such passions are false
gods that will have victims at all costs and in
the present case have had one wreathed vnth.
bay. Now I have plucked the thorn out — that
little scrawled line of yours rankled terribly.
I now think merely of your getting quite well
again, and writing at last the wonderful story of
. . . Pray remember me with my thanks to your
dear mother, and also to Aleck. The ' Gilded
Sphinx ' ^ is, I suppose, wonderful as ever.
And send from me all that in my thoughts and
feelings is good, and whatever of remembrance
and reverence she will accept, to the lady of
Wimbledon, whose soul is a sanctuai-y for those

* The ' Gilded Sphinx ' is a nickname given to the clever
aathor of The Twelfth Hour. She became acquainted with
"Wilde through her amusing parodies of his work in Pxmch.
She received him hospitably at her house in 1895 when he
was released on bail between his trials.

LETTERS FROM READING PRISON 9

who are wounded and a house of refuge for
those in pain. Do not show this letter to
others — nor discuss what I have written in your
answer. Tell me about that world of shadows
I loved so much. And about the life and the
soul tell me also. I am curious of the things
that stung me ; and in my pain there is pity.
Yours,

Oscar

Letter III

April Ut, 1897.
My dear Robbie, — I send you a MS. separate
from this, which I hope will arrive safely. As
soon as you have read it, I want you to have it
carefully copied for me. There are many causes
why I wish this to be done. One will suffice.
I want you to be my literary executor in case
of my death, and to have complete control of
my plays, books, and papers. As soon as I find
I have a legal right to make a will, I will do so.
My wife does not understand my art, nor could

10 LETTERS FROM READING PRISON

be expected to have any interest in it, and Cyril
is only a child. So I turn naturally to you, as
indeed I do for everything, and would like you
to have all my works. The deficit that their
sale will produce may be lodged to the credit
of Cyril and Vivian. Well, if you are my
literary executor, you must be in possession of
the only document that gives any explanation
of my extraordinary behaviour. . . . When you
have read the letter, you will see the psycho-
logical explanation of a course of conduct that
from the outside seems a combination of
absolute idiotcy with vulgar bravado. Some
day the truth will have to be known — not
necessarily in my lifetime . . . but I am not
prepared to sife in the grotesque pillory they
put me into, for all time ; for the simple reason
that I inherited from my father and mother a
name of high distinction in literature and art,
and I cannot for eternity allow that name to be
degraded. I don't defend my conduct. I ex-
plain it. Also there are in my letter certain
passages which deal with my mental develop-
ment in prison, and the inevitable evolution of

LETTERS FROiM READING PRISON 11

my character and intellectual attitude towards
life that has taken place : and I want you and
others who still stand by me and have affection
for me to know exactly in what mood and
manner I hope to face the world. Of course
from one point of \ieyr I know that on the day
of my release I shall be merely passing from one
prison into another, and there are times when
the whole world seems to me no larger than my
cell and as full of terror for me. Still I believe
that at the beginning God made a world for
each separate man, and in that world which is
within us we should seek to live. At any rate
you will read those parts of my letter with less
pain than the others. Of course I need not
remind you how fluid a thing thought is with
me — with us all — and of what an evanescent
substance are our emotions made. Still I do
see a sort of possible goal towards which,
through art, I may progress. It is not unlikely
that you may help me.

As regards the mode of copying : of course
it is too long for any amanuensis to attempt :
and your own handwriting, dear Robbie, in your

12 LETTERS FROM READING PRISON

last letter seems specially designed to remind
me that the task is not to be yours. I think that
the only thing to do is to be thoroughly modem
and to have it typewritten. Of course the MS.
should not pass out of your control, but could
you not get Mrs. Marshall to send down one
of her typewriting girls — women are the most
reliable as they have no memory for the im-
portant — to Homton Street or Phillimore
Gardens, to do it under your supervision.-* I
assure you that the typewriting machine, when
played with expression, is not more annoying
than the piano when played by a sister or
near relation. Indeed many among those
most devoted to domesticity prefer it. I
wish the copy to be done not on tissue
paper but on good paper such as is used for
plays, and a wide rubricated margin should be
left for corrections. ... If the copy is done
at Homton Street the lady typewriter might
be fed through a lattice in the door, like the
Cardinals when they elect a Pope; till she
comes out on the balcony and can say to the
world : ' Habet Mundus Epistolam ' ; for indeed

LETTERS FROM READING PRISON 13

it is an Encyclical letter, and as the Bulls of the
Holy Father are named from their opening
words, it may be spoken of as the ' Epistola : in
Carcere et Vinculis' ... In point of fact, Robbie,
prison life makes one see people and things as
they really are. That is why it turns one to
stone. It is the people outside who are deceived
by the illusions of a life in constant motion.
They revolve with life and contribute to its
unreality. We who are immobile both see and
know. Whether or not the letter does good to
narrow natures and hectic brains, to me it has
done good. I have 'cleansed my bosom of
much perilous stuff' ; to borrow a phrase from
the poet whom you and I once thought of
rescuing from the Philistines. I need not
remind you that mere expression is to an artist
the supreme and only mode of life. It is by
utterance that we live. Of the many, many
things for which I have to thank the Governor
there is none for which I am more grateful than
for his permission to write fully and at as great
a length as I desire. For nearly two years I
had within a growing burden of bitterness, of

14 LETTERS FROM READING PRISON

much of which I have now got rid. On the
other side of the prison wall there are some
poor black soot-besmirched trees that are just
breaking out into buds of an almost shrill green.
I know quite well what they are going through.
They are finding expression.

Ever yours,

Oscar

Letter IV

April Gtk, 1897.
, , , Consider now, my dear Robbie, my pro-
posal. I think my wife, who in money matters
is most honourable and high-minded, will refund
the JE — paid for my share. I have no doubt
she will. But I think it should be offered from
me and that I should not accept anything in the
way of income from her ; I can accept what is
given in love and affection to me, but I could
not accept what is doled out grudgingly or with
conditions. I would sooner let my wife be quite
free. She may marry again. In any case I
think that if free she would allow me to see my

LETTERS FROM READING PRISON 16

children from time to time. That is what I
■want. But I must set her free first, and had
better do it as a gentleman by bowing my head
and accepting everything. You must consider
the whole question, as it is to you and your ill-
advised action it is due : and let me know what
you and others think. Of course you acted for
the best. But you were wrong in your view, I
may say candidly that I am getting gradually to
a state of mind when 1 think that everything
that happens is for the best. This may be
philosophy or a broken heart, or religion, or the
dull apathy of despair. But, whatever its origin,
the feeling is strong with me. To tie my wife
to me against her will would be wrong. She
has a full right to her freedom. And not to be
supported by her would be a pleasure to me. It
is an ignominious position to be a pensioner on
her. Talk over this with More Adey. Get him
to show you the letter I have written to him.
Ask your brother Aleck to give me his advice.
He has excellent wisdom on things.

Now to other points.

I have never had the chance of thanking you

16 LErrERS FROM READING PRISON

for the books. They were most welcome. Not
being allowed the magazines was a blow, but
Meredith's novel charmed me. What a sane
artist in temper! He is quite right in his
assertion of sanity as the essential in romance.
Still up to the present only the abnormal has
found expression in life and literature. Rossetti's
letters are dreadful; obviously forgeries by his
brother. I was interested, however, to see how
my grand-uncle's Melmoih and my mother's
Sidonia have been two of the books that fascinated
his youth. As regards the conspiracy against
him in later years, I believe it really existed,
and that the funds for it came out of Hake's ^
Bank. The conduct of a thrush in Cheyne Walk
seems to be most suspicious, though William
Rossetti says : ' I could discern nothing in the
thrush's song at all out of the common.' Steven-
son's lettei's are most disappointing also — I see
that romantic surroundings are the worst sur-
roundings possible for a romantic writer. In

1 Egmont Hake, author of Free Trade in Capital and
advocate of a new scheme of banking which amused Wilde
very much.

LETTERS FROM READING PRISON 17

Gower Street Stevenson could have written a
new Trots Mousquetaires. In Samoa he wrote
letters to the Times about Germans. I see also
the traces of a terrible strain to lead a natural
life. To chop wood with any advantage to
oneself or profit to others, one should not be
able to describe the process. In point of fact
the natural life is the unconscious life. Steven-
son merely extended the sphere of the artificial
by taking to digging. The whole dreary book
has given me a lesson. If I spend my future
life reading Baudelaire in a caf6 I shall be lead-
ing a more natural life than if I take to hedger's
work or plant cacao in mud-swamps. En Route
is most overrated. It is sheer journalism. It
never makes one hear a note of the music it
describes. The subject is delightful, but the
style is of course worthless, slipshod, flaccid. It
is worse French than Ohnet's. Ohnet tries to
be commonplace and succeeds. Huysmans tries
not to be, and is. Hardy's novel is pleasant,
and the style perfect; and Harold Frederic's
very interesting in matter. Later on, there
being hardly any novels in the prison library for

is LETTERS FROM READING PRISON

the poor imprisoned fellows I live with, I think
of presenting the Library with about a dozen
good novels: Stevenson's (none here but the
Black Arrow), some of Thackeray's (none here),
Jane Austen (none here), and some good Dumas-
pere-like books, by Stanley Weyman, for instance,
and any modem young man. You mentioned
Henley had a protege?^ Also the Anthony
Hope man. After Easter you might make out
a list of about fourteen and apply to let me
have them. They would please the few who do
not care about De Goncourt's journal.^ Don't
forget I would pay myself for them. I have a
horror myself of going out into a world without
a single book of my own. I wonder would there

be any of my friends, such as C L ,

Reggie Turner, G B , Max, and the like,

who would give me a few books? You know
the sort of books I want ; Flaubert, Stevenson,
Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Dumas pere, Keats,
Marlowe, Chatterton, Coleridge, Anatole France,

1 This is ftlr. H. G. Wella.

^ De Goncourt's journal, of which a new volume had been
published, contained references to Wilde. It was one of the
books sent to him in prison.

LETTERS FROM READING PRISON 19

Gautier, Dante and all Dante literature : Goethe
and Goethe literature, and so on. I should feel
it a great compliment to have books waiting for
me — and perhaps there may be some friends
who would like to be kind to me. One is really
very grateful, though I fear I often seem not to
be. But then remember I have had incessant
worries besides prison-life.

In answer to this you can send me a long
letter all about plays and books. Your hand-
writing, in your last, was so dreadful that it
looked as if you were writing a three volume
novel on the terrible spread of communistic
ideas among the rich, or in some other way
wasting a youth that always has been, and
always will remain, quite full of promise. If I
wrong you in ascribing it to such a cause, you
must make allowances for the morbidity pro-
duced by long imprisonment. But do write
clearly. Otherwise it looks as if you had some-
thing to conceal.

There is much that is horrid, I suppose, in
this letter. But I had to blame you to yourself,
not to others. Read my letter to More. Harris

20 LETTERS FROM READING PRISON

comes to see me on Saturday, I hope. Remem-
ber me to Arthur Clifton and his wife, who, I
find, is so like Rossetti's wife — the same lovely
hair — ^but of course a sweeter nature, though
Miss Siddal is fascinating and her poem Al.
Yours ever,

Oscar

DE PROFUNDIS

MY place would be between Gilles de Retz
and the Marquis de Sade. I dare say
it is best so. I have no desire to complain.
One of the many lessons that one learns in
prison is, that things are what they are and will
be what they will be. Nor have I any doubt
that the leper of medisevalism and the author of
Justine will prove better company than Sandford
and Merion. . .

All this took place in the early part of
November of the year before last. A great
river of life flows between me and a date so
distant. Hardly, if at all, can you see across so
wide a waste. But to me it seems to have
occurred, I will not say yesterday, but to-day.
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot

22 DE PROFUNDIS

divide it by seasons. We can only record its
moods, and clironicle their return. With us
time itself does not progress. It revolves. It
seems to circle round one centre of pain. The
paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance
of which is regulated after an unchangeable
pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down
and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according
to the inflexible laws of an iron formula; this
immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day
in the very minutest detail like its brother,
seems to communicate itself to those external
forces, the very essence of whose existence is
ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of
the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape
gatherers threading through the vines, of the
gi-ass in the orchard made white with broken
blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit : of these we
know nothing, and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of
sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken
from us. Outside, the day may be blue and
gold, but the light that creeps down through
the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred

DE PROFUNDIS 23

window beneath which one sits is grey and
niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as
it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the
sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of
time, motion is no more. The thing that you
personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily
forget, is happening to me now, and will happen
to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and
you will be able to understand a little of
why I am writing, and in this manner
writing. . . .

A week later, I am transferred here. Three
more months go over and my mother dies. No
one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her.
Her death was terrible to me ; but I, once a
lord of language, have no words in which to
express my anguish and my shame. Never even
in the most perfect days of my development as
an artist could I have found words fit to bear so
august a burden ; or to move with sufficient
stateliness of music through the purple pageant
of my incommunicable woe. She and my
father had bequeathed me a name they had
made noble and honoured, not merely in litera-

24 DE PROFUNDIS

ture, art, archaeology, and science, but in
the public history of ray own country, in
its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that
name eternally. I had made it a low byword
among low people. I had dragged it through
the very mire. I had given it to brutes that
they might make it brutal, and to fools that
they might turn it into a synonym for folly.
What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not
for pen to write or paper to record. My wife,
always kind and gentle to me, rather than that
I should hear the news from indifferent lips,
travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa
to England to break to me herself the tidings
of so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss. Mes-
sages of sympathy reached me from all who
had still affection for me. Even people who
had not known me personally, hearing that a
new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote to
ask that some expression of their condolence
should be conveyed to me. . . .

Three months go over. The calendar of
my daily conduct and labour that hangs on
the outside of my cell door, with my name

DE PROFUNDIS 25

and sentence written upon it, tells me that it
is May. . . .

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough
of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the
most sensitive of all created things. There is
nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought
to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and
exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of
tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of
forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse.
It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that
of love touches it, and even then must bleed again,
though not in pain.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
Some day people will realise what that means.
They will know nothing of life till they do.

and natures like his can realise it. When

I was brought down from my prison to the
Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,

waited in the long dreary corridor that,

before the whole crowd, whom an action so
sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might
gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and
with bowed head, I passed him by. Men

20 DE PROFUNDJS

have gone to heaven for smaller things than
that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode
of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the
feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on
the cheek. I have never said one single word
to him about what he did. I do not know to
the present moment whether he is aware that
I was even conscious of his action. It is not
a thing for which one can render formal thanks
in formal words. I store it in the treasure-house
of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt
that I am glad to think I can never possibly
repay. It is embalmed and kept sweet by the
myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom
has been profitless to me, philosophy barren,
and the proverbs and phrases of those who
have sought to give me consolation as dust
and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that
little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed
for me all the wells of pity : made the desert
blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the
bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the
wounded, broken, and great heart of the world.
When people are able to understand, not merely

DE PROFUNDIS 27

how beautiful 's action was, but why it

meant so much to me, and always will mean
so much, then, perhaps, they will realise how
and in what spirit they should approach
me. . . .

The first volume of Poems that in the very
springtide of his manhood a young man sends
forth to the world should be like a blossom or
flower of spring, like the white thorn in the
meadow at Magdalen or the cowslips in the
Cumnor fields. It should not be burdened by
the weight of a terrible and revolting tragedy ;
a terrible revolting scandal. If I had allowed
my name to serve as herald to such a book, it
would have been a grave artistic error ; it would
have brought a wrong atmosphere round the
whole work and in modern art atmosphere
counts for so much. Modem life is complex
and relative ; those are its two distinguishing
notes ; to render the first we require atmosphere
with its subtlety of nuances, of suggestion, of
strange perspectives; as for the second we
require background. That is why sculpture has

28 DE PROFUNDIS

ceased to be a representative art and why music
is a representative art and why literature is, and
has been and always will remain the supreme
representative art. . . .

Every twelve weeks R writes to me a

little budget of literary news. Nothing can
be more charming than his letters, in their
wit, their clever concentrated criticism, their
light touch : they are real letters, they are
like a person talking to one; they have the
quality of a French causerie intime; and in his
delicate mode of deference to me, appealing at
one time to my judgment, at another to my
sense of humour, at another to my instinct for
beauty or to my culture, and reminding me in
a hundred subtle ways that once I was to many
arbiter of style in art; the supreme arbiter to
some ; he shows how he has the tact of love
as well as the tact of literature. His letters
have been the messengers between me and that
beautiful unreal world of art where once I was
King, and would have remained King indeed,
had I not let myself be lured into the imperfect

DE PROFUNDIS 29

world of coarse uncompleted passion, of appetite
without distinction, desire without limit, and
formless greed. Yet when all is said surely

might have been able to understand or

conceive, at any rate that on the ordinary
grounds of mere psychological curiosity it would
have been more interesting to me to hear from

than to learn that Alfred Austin was trying

to bring out a volume of poems; that George
Street was writing dramatic criticism for the
Daily Chronicle', or that by one who cannot
speak a panegyric without stammering, Mrs.
Meynell had been pronounced to be the new
Sibyl of style. . . .

• •••••

Other miserable men when they are thrown
into prison, if they are robbed of the beauty of
the world are at least safe in some measure from
the world's most deadly slings, most awful
arrows. They can hide in the darkness of
their cells and of their very disgrace make a
mode of sanctuary. The world having had its
will goes its way, and they are left to suffer
undisturbed. With me it has been different.

30 DE PROFUNDIS

Sorrow after sorrow has come beating at the
prison doors in search of me ; they have opened
the gates wide and let them in. Hardly if
at all have my friends been suffered to see me.
Bijt my enemies have had full access to me
always; twice in my public appearances in the
Bankruptcy Court; twice again in my public
transferences from one prison to anotlier have
I been shown under conditions of unspeakable
humiliation to the gaze and mockery of men.
The messenger of Death had brought me his
tidings and gone his way ; and in entire solitude
and isolated from all that could give me comfort
or suggest relief I have had to bear the intoler-
able burden of misery and remorse, which the
memory of my mother placed upon me and
places on me still. Hardly has that wound
been dulled, not healed, by time, when violent
and bitter and harsh letters come to me from
solicitors. I am at once taunted and threatened
with poverty. That I can bear. I can school
myself to worse than that ; but my two children
are taken from me by legal procedure. That
iSj and always will remain to me a source of

DE PROFUNDIS 31

infinite distress, of infinite pain, of grief without
end or limit. That the law should decide and
take upon itself to decide that I am one unfit to
be with my own children is something quite
horrible to me. The disgrace of prison is as
nothing compared with it. I envy the other
men who tread the yard along with me. I am
sure that their children wait for them, look for
their coming, will be sweet to them.

The poor are wiser, more charitable, more
kind, more sensitive than we are. In their
eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a
misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for
sympathy in others. They speak of one who
is in prison as of one who is * in trouble ' simply.
It is the phrase they always use, and the expres-
sion has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With
people of our own rank it is different. With us,
prison makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I
am, have hardly any right to air and sun. Our
presence taints the pleasures of others. We are
unwelcome when we reappear. To revisit the
glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our very
children are taken away. Those lovely links

32 DE PROFUNDIS

with humanity are broken. We are doomed to
be solitary, while our sons still live. We are
denied the one thing that might heal us and
keep us, that might bring balm to the bruised
heart, and peace to the soul in pain. . . ,

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and
that nobody great or small can be ruined except
by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so.
I am trying to say so, though they may not
think it at the present moment. This pitiless
indictment I bring without pity against myself.
Terrible as was what the world did to me,
what I did to myself was far more terrible
still.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations
to the art and culture of my age. I had realised
this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood,
and had forced my age to realise it afterwards.
Few men hold such a position in their own life-
time, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually
discerned, if discerned at aU, by the historian,
or the critic, long after both the man and his
age have passed away. With me it was different.
I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron

DE PR0FUNDI8 33

was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to
the passion of his age and its weariness of
passion. Mine were to something more noble,
more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger
scope.

The gods had given me almost everything. I
had genius, a distinguished name, high social
position, brilliancy, intellectual daring ; I made
art a philosophy and philosophy an art : I altered
the minds of men and the colours of things;
there was nothing I said or did that did not
make people wonder. I took the drama, the
most objective form known to art, and made
it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric
or sonnet; at the same time I widened its
range and enriched its characterisation. Drama,
novel, poem in prose, poem in rhyme, subtle
or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched, I
made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to
truth itself I gave what is false no less than
what is true as its rightfid province, and showed
that the false and the true are merely forms of
intellectual existence. I treated art as the
supreme reality and life as a mere mode of
c

M DE PROFUNDIS

fiction. I awoke the imagination of my century
so that it created myth and legend around me.
I summed up all systems in a phrase and all
existence in an epigram. Along with these
things I had things that were different. But
I let myself be lured into long spells of sense-
less and sensual ease. I amused myself with
being a -flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I
surrounded myself with the smaller natures
and the meaner minds. I became the spend-
thrift of my own genius, and to waste an
eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired
of being on the heights, I deliberately went
to the depths in the search for new sensation.
What the paradox was to me in the sphere of
thought, perversity became to me in the sphere
of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady,
or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the
lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased
me, and passed on. I forgot that every little
action of the common day makes or unmakes
character, and that therefore what one has
done in the secret chamber one has some day
to cry aloud on the housetops. 1 ceased to be

DE PROFUNDIS 3S

lord over myself. I was no longer the captain
of ray soul, and did not know it. I allowed
pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible
disgrace. There is only one thing for me now,
absolute humility.

I have lain in prison for nearly two years.
Out of my nature has come wild despair; an
abandonment to grief that was piteous even to
look at ; terrible and impotent rage ; bitterness
and scorn ; anguish that wept aloud ; misery
that could find no voice; sorrow that was
dumb. I have passed through every possible
mood of suffering. Better than Wordsworth
himself I know what Wordsworth meant when
he said —

Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark.
And has the nature of infinity.

But while there were times when I rejoiced
in the idea that my sufferings were to be
endless, I could not bear them to be without
meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away
in my nature something that tells me that
Nothing in the whole world is meaningless.

96 DE PROFUNDIS

and suffering least of all. That something
hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a
field, is Humility.

It is the last thing left in me, and the best :
the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived,
the starting-point for a fresh development. It
has come to me right out of myself, so I know
that it has come at the proper time. It could
not have come before, nor later. Had any one
told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it
been brought to me, I would have refused it.
As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so.
It is the one thing that has in it the elements of
life, of a new life, a Viia Nuova for me. Of all
things it is the strangest; one cannot give it
away and another may not give it to one. One
cannot acquire it except by surrendering every-
thing that one has. It is only when one has
lost all things, that one knows that one
possesses it

Now I have realised that it is in me, I see
quite clearly what I ought to do ; in fact, must
do. And when I use such a phrase as that, I
need not say that I am not alluding to any

DE PROFUNDIS 9!

external sanction or command. I admit none.
I am far more of an individualist than I ever
was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest
value except what one gets out of oneself.
My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-
realisation. That is all I am concerned with.
And the first thing that I have got to do is
to free myself from any possible bitterness of
feeling against the world.

I am completely penniless, and absolutely
homeless. Yet there are worse things in the
world than that. I am quite candid when I say
that rather than go out from this prison with
bitterness in my heart against the world, I would
gladly and readily beg my bread from door to
door. If I got nothing from the house of the
rich I would get something at the house of the
poor. Those who have much are often greedy ;
those who have little always share. I would not
a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer,
and when winter came on sheltering myself by
the warm close-thatched rick, or under the pent-
house of a great barn, provided I had love in my
heart. The external things of life seem to me

38 DE PROFUNDIS

now of no importance at all. You can see to
what intensity of individualism I have arrived —
or am arriving rather, for the journey is long,
and ' where I walk there are thorns.'

Of course I know that to ask alms on the
highway is not to be my lot, and that if ever I
lie in the cool grass at night-time it will be to
Mrrite sonnets to the moon. When I go out of

prison, R will be waiting for me on the

other side of the big iron-studded gate, and he
is the symbol, not merely of his own affection,
but of the affection of many others besides. I
believe I am to have enough to live on for about
eighteen months at any rate, so that if I may
not write beautiful books, I may at least read
beautiful books; and what joy can be greater?
After that, I hope to be able to recreate my
creative faculty.

But were things different : had I not a friend
left in the world ; were there not a single house
open to me in pity ; had I to accept the wallet
and ragged cloak of sheer penury : as long as I
am free from all resentment, hardness, and
scorn, I would be able to face the life with much

DE PROFUNDIS 9B

more calm and confidence than I would were my
body in purple and fine linen^ and the soul
within me sick with hate.

And I really shall have no difficulty. When
you really want love you will find it waiting for
you.

I need not say that my task does not end
there. It would be comparatively easy if it did.
There is much more before me. I have hills far
steeper to climb, valleys much darker to pass
through. And I have to get it all out of myself.
Neither religion, morality, nor reason can help
me at all.

Morality does not help me. I am a bom
antinomian. I am one of those who are made
for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see
that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I
see that there is something wrong in what one
becomes. It is well to have learned that.

Religion does not help me. The faith that
others give to what is unseen, I give to what one
can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in
temples made with hands ; and within the circle
of actual experience is my creed noade perfect

40 DE PROFUNDIS

and complete : too complete, it may be, for like
many or all of those vrho have placed their
heaven in this earth, I have found in it not
merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of
hell also. When I think about religion at all, I
feel as if I would like to found an order for
those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of
the Faithless one might call it, where on an
altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in
whose heart peace had no dwelling, might cele-
brate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty
of wine. Every thing to be true must become
a religion. And agnosticism should have its
ritual no less than faith. It has sown its
martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God
daily for having hidden Himself from man.
But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must
be nothing external to me. Its symbols must
be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual
which makes its own form. If I may not find
its secret within myself, I shall never find it:
if I have not got it already, it will never come
to me.

Reason does not help me. It tells me that

DE PROFUNDIS 41

the laws under which I am convicted are wrong
and unjust laws, and the system under which I
have suffered a wrong and unjust system. But,
somehow, I have got to make both of these
things just and right to me. And exactly as in
Art one is only concerned with what a particular
thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it
is also in the ethical evolution of one's character.
I have got to make everything that has happened
to me good for me. The plank bed, the loath-
some food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum
till one's finger-tips grow dull with pain^ the
menial offices with which each day begins and
finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems
to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes
sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the soli-
tude, the shame — each and all of these things I
have to transform into a spiritual experience.
There is not a single degradation of the body
which I must not try and make into a spiritualis-
ing of the soul.

I want to get to the point when I shall be able
to say quite simply, and without affectation,
that the two great turning-points in my life

42 . DE PROFUNDIS

were when my father sent me to Oxford, and
when society sent me to prison. I will not say
that prison is the best thing that could have
happened to me ; for that phrase would savour
of too great bitterness towards myself. I would
sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so
typical a child of my age, that in my perversity,
and for that perversity's sake, I turned the good
things of my life to evil, and the evil things of
my life to good.

What is said, however, by myself or by others,
matters little. The important thing, the thing
that lies before me, the thing that I have to do,
if the brief remainder of my days is not to be
maimed, marred, and incomplete, is to absorb
into my nature all that has been done to me, to
make it part of me, to accept it without com-
plaint, fear, or reluctance. The supreme vice is
shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.

When first I was put into prison some people
advised me to try and forget who I was. It was
ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I
am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now
I am advised by others to try on my release to

DE PROFUNDIS 43

forget that I have ever been in a prison at all.
I know that would be equally fatal. It would
mean that I would always be haunted by an
intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those
things that are meant for me as much as for
anybody else — the beauty of the sun and moon,
the pageant of the seasons, the music of day-
break and the silence of great nights, the rain
falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping
over the grass and making it silver — would all
be tainted for me, and lose their healing power
and their power of communicating joy. To
regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's
own development. To deny one's own experi-
ences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own
life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds,
things common and unclean no less than those
that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and
converts them into swiftness or strength, into
the play of beautiful muscles and the moulding
of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the
hair, the lids, the eye; so the soul in its turn
has its nutritive functions also, and can transform

U DE PR0FUNDI8

into noble moods of thought and passions of
high import what in itself is base, cruel, and
degrading; nay, more, may find in these its
most august modes of assertion, and can often
reveal itself most perfectly through what was
intended to desecrate or destroy.

The fact of my having been the common
prisoner of a common gaol I must frankly accept,
and, curious as it may seem, one of the things I
shall have to teach myself is not to be ashamed
of it. I must accept it as a punishment, and if
one is ashamed of having been punished, one
might just as well never have been punished at
all. Of course there are many things of which
I was convicted that I had not done, but then
there are many things of which I was convicted
that I had done, and a still greater number of
things in my life for which I was never indicted
at all. And as the gods are strange, and punish
us for what is good and humane in us as much
as for what is evil and perverse, I must accept
the fact that one is punished for the good as
well as for the evil that one does. I have no
doubt that it is quite right one should be. It

DE PROFUNDIS 46

helps one, or should help one, to realise both,
and not to be too conceited about either. And
if I then am not ashamed of my punishment, as
I hope not to be, I shall be able to think, and
walkj and live with freedom.

Many men on their release carry their prison
about with them into the air, and hide it as a
secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length,
like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole
and die. It is wretched that they should have
to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of
society that it should force them to do so.
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict
appalhng punishment on the individual, but it
also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and
fails to realise what it has done. When the
man's punishment is over, it leaves him to him-
self; that is to say, it abandons him at the very
moment when its highest duty towards him
begins. It is really ashamed of its own actions,
and shuns those whom it has punished, as people
shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or
one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable,
an irremediable wrong. I can claim on my side

48 DE PROFUNDIS

that if I realise what I have sufTered, society
should realise what it has inflicted on me ; and
that there should be no bitterness or hate on
either side.

Of course I know that from one point of view
things will be made different for me than for
others j must indeed, by the very nature of the
case, be made so. The poor thieves and out-
casts who are imprisoned here with me are in
many respects more fortunate than I am. The
little way in grey city or green field that saw
their sin is small; to find those who know
nothing of what they have done they need go
no further than a bird might fly between the
twilight at dawn and dawn itself: but for me
the world is shrivelled to a handsbreadth, and
everywhere I turn my name is written on the
rocks in lead. For I have come, not from
obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime,
but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of
eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to my-
self to have shown, if indeed it required showing,
that between the famous and the infamous there
is but one step, if as much as one.

DE PROFUNDIS 47

Still, in the very fact that people will recog-
nise me wherever I go, and know all about my
life, as far as its follies go, I can discern some-
thing good for me. It will force on me the
necessity of again asserting myself as an artist,
and as soon as I possibly can. If I can produce
only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to
rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its
sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by
the roots.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me,
I am no less a problem to life. People must
adopt some attitude towards me, and so pass
judgment both on themselves and me. I need
not say I am not talking of particular individuals.
The only people I would care to be with now
are artists and people who have suffered : those
who know what beauty is, and those who know
what sorrow is : nobody else interests me. Nor
am I making any demands on life. In all that I
have said I am simply concerned with my own
mental attitude towards life as a whole ; and I
feel that not to be ashamed of having been
punished is one of the first points I must attain

48 DE PR0FUNDI8

to, for the sake of my own perfection, and be-
cause I am so imperfect.

Then I must learn how to be happy. Once I
knew it, or thought I knew it, by instinct. It
was always springtime once in my heart. My
temperament was akin to joy. I filled my life
to the very brim with pleasure, as one might fill
a cup to the very brim with wine. Now I am
approaching life from a completely new stand-
point, and even to conceive happiness is often
extremely difficult for me. I remember during
my first term at Oxford reading in Pater's
Renaissance — that book which has had such
strange influence over my life — how Dante
places low in the Inferno those who wilfully live
in sadness ; and going to the college library and
turning to the passage in the Divine Comedy
where beneath the dreary marsh lie those who
were 'sullen in the sweet air/ saying for ever
and ever through their sighs —
Tristi fummo
Nell' aere dolce, che dal sol s'allegra.

I knew the Church condemned accidia, but the
whole idea seemed to me quite fantastic, just the

DE PROFUNDIS 49

sort of sin, I fancied, a priest who knew nothing
about real life would invent. Nor could I
understand how Dante, who says that 'sorrow
re-marries us to God/ could have been so harsh
to those who were enamoured of melancholy, if
any such there really were. I had no idea that
some day this would become to me one of the
greatest temptations of my life.

Wliile I was in Wandsworth prison I longed to
die. It was my one desire. When after two
months in the infirmary I was transferred here,
and found myself growing gradually better in
physical health, I was filled with rage. I deter-
mined to commit suicide on the very day on
which I left prison. After a time that evil
mood passed away, and I made up my mind to
live, but to wear gloom as a king wears purple :
never to smile again : to turn whatever house I
entered into a house of mourning : to make my
friends walk slowly in sadness with me : to
teuch them that melancholy is the true secret
of life : to maim them with an alien sorrow : to
mar them with my own pain. Now I feel quite
differently. I see it would be both ungrateful

so DE PROFUNDIS

and unkind of me to pull so long a face that
when my friends came to see me they would
have to make their faces still longer in order to
show their sympathy ; or, if I desired to enter-
tain them, to invite them to sit down silently to
bitter herbs and funeral baked meats. I must
learn how to be cheerful and happy.

The last two occasions on which I was allowed
to see my friends here, I tried to be as cheerful
as possible, and to show my cheerfulness, in
order to make them some slight return for their
trouble in coming all the way from town to see
me. It is only a slight return, I know, but it is
the one, I feel certain, that pleases them most.

I saw R for an hour on Saturday week, and

I tried to give the fullest possible expression of
the delight I really felt at our meeting. And
that, in the views and ideas I am here shaping
for myself, I am quite right is shown to me by
the fact that now for the first time since my
imprisonment I have a real desire for life.

There is before me so much to do that I would
regard it as a terrible tragedy if I died before I
was allowed to complete at any rate a little of

DE PROFDNDIS 81

it. I see new developments in art and life, each
one of which is a fresh mode of perfection. I
long to live so that I can explore what is no less
than a new world to me. Do you want to
know what this new world is ? I think you can
guess what it is. It is the world in which I
have been living. Sorrow, then, and all that it
teaches one, is my new world.

I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned
suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated
both. I resolved to ignore them as far as
possible : to treat them, that is to say, as modes
of imperfection. They were not part of my
scheme of life. They had no place in my
philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a
whole, used often to quote to me Goethe's lines
— written by Carlyle in a book he had given
her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy,
also : —

Who never ate his bread in sorrow.
Who never spent the midnight hours

Weeping and waiting for the morrow, —
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.

They were the hnes which that noble Queen

«8 DE PROFUNDIS

of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with such
coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation
and exile ; they were the lines my mother often
quoted in the troubles of her later life. I
absolutely declined to accept or admit the
enormous truth hidden in them. I could not
understand it. I remember quite well how I
used to tell her that I did not want to eat my
bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping
and watching for a more bitter dawn.

I had no idea that it was one of the special
things that the Fates had in store for me : that
for a whole year of my life, indeed, I was to do
little else. But so has my portion been meted
out to me; and during the last few months I
have, after terrible difficulties and struggles, been
able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden
in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people
who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk
of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revela-
tion. One discerns things one never discerned
before. One approaches the whole of history
from a different standpoint. What one had felt
dimly, through instinct, about art, is intel-

DE PROFUNDIS 153

lectually and emotionally realised with perfect
clearness of vision and absolute intensity of
apprehension.

I now see that sorrow, being tin*, supreme
emotion of which man is capable, is at once the
type and test of all great art. What the artist
is always looking for is the mode of existence in
which soul and body are one and indivisible : in
which the outward is expressive of the inward :
in which form reveals. Of such modes of
existence there are not a few: youth and the
arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a
model for us at one moment : at another we may
like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitive-
ness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit
dwelling in external things and making its
raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike,
and in its morbid S3niipathy of its moods, and
tones, and colours, modem landscape art is
realising for us pictorially what was realised in
such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music,
in which all subject is absorbed in expression and
cannot be separated from it, is a complex
example, and a flower or a child a simple

64 DE PROFUNDIS

example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the
ultimate type both in life and art.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a
temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But
behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain,
unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is
not any correspondence between the essential
idea and the accidental existence ; it is not the
resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form
mirrored in the crystal to the form itself ; it is no
echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it
is a silver well of water in the valley that shows
the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcis-
sus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with
itself: the outward rendered expressive of the
inward : the soul made incarnate : the body
instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no
truth comparable to sorrow. There are times
when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.
Other things may be illusions of the eye or the
appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the
other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been
built, and at the birth of a child or a star there
is pain.

DE PROFUNDIS W

More than this, there is about sorrow an
intense, an extraordinary reality. I have said of
myself that I was one who stood in symbolic
relations to the art and culture of my age.
There is not a single wretched man in this
wretched place along with me who does not
stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of
hfe. For the secret of life is suffering. It is
what is hidden behind everything. When we
begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us,
and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably
direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek
not merely for a ' month or twain to feed on
honeycomb/ but for all our years to taste no
other food, ignorant all the while that we may
really be starving the soul.

I remember talking once on this subject to
one of the most beautiful personalities I have
ever known : ^ a woman, whose sjonpathy and
noble kindness to me, both before and since the
tragedy of my imprisonment, have been beyond

' ThiB is the lady at "Wimbledon to whom reference is made
in Letter n., and to whom the editor has dedicated the
Duchess of Padwu

56 DE PROFUNDIS

power and description; one who has really
assisted me, though she does not know it, to
bear the burden of my troubles more than any
one else in the whole world has, and all through
the mere fact of her existence, through her
being what she is — partly an ideal and partly an
influence : a suggestion of what one might
become as well as a real help towards becoming
it ; a soul that renders the common air sweet,
and makes what is spiritual seem as simple and
natural as sunlight or the sea : one for whom
beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand, and have
the same message. On the occasion of which I
am thinking I recall distinctly how I said to her
that there was enough suffering in one narrow
London lane to show that God did not love raan^
and that wherever there was any sorrow, though
but that of a child in some little garden weep-
ing over a fault that it had or had not committed,
the whole face of creation was completely
marred. I was entirely wrong. She told me
so, but I could not believe her. I was not in the
sphere in which such belief was to be attained
to. Now it seems to me that love of some kind

DE PR0FUNDI8 57

is the only possible explanation of the extra-
ordinary amount of suffering that there is in the
world. I cannot conceive of any other explana-
tion. I am convinced that there is no other, and
that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been
built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands
of love, because in no other way could the soul
of man^ for whom the world was made, reach
the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for
the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful
soul.

When I say that I am convinced of these
things I speak with too much pride. Far off",
like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God.
It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child
could reach it in a summer's day. And so a
child could. But with me and such as me it is
different. One can realise a thing in a single
moment, but one loses it in the long hours that
follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep
'heights that the soul is competent to gain.'
We think in eternity, but we move slowly
through time ; and how slowly time goes with us
who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of

58 DE PR0FUND18

the weariness and despair that creep back into
one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with
such strange insistence that one has, as it were,
to garnish and sweep one's house for their com-
ing, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter
master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance
or choice to be.

And, though at present my friends may find it
a hard thing to believe, it is true none the less,
that for them living in freedom and idleness and
comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of
humility than it is for me, who begin the day by
going down on my knees and washing the floor
of my cell. For prison life with its endless
privations and restrictions makes one rebellious.
The most terrible thing about it is not that it
breaks one's heart — hearts are made to be
broken — but that it turns one's heart to stone.
One sometimes feels that it is only with a front
of brass and a lip of scorn that one can get
through the day at all. And he who is in a
state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use
the phrase of which the Church is so fond — so
rightly fond, I dare say — for in life as in art the

DE PROFUNDIS 69

mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the
soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven. Yet I
must learn these lessons here, if I am to learn
them anywhere, and must be filled with joy if
my feet are on the right road and my face set
towards 'the gate which is called beautiful,'
though I may fall many times in the mire and
often in the mist go astray.

This New Life, as through my love of Dante
I like sometimes to call it, is of course no new
life at all, but simply the continuance, by means
of development and evolution, of my former
life. I remember when I was at Oxford saying
to one of my friends as we were strolling round
Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one
morning in the year before I took my degree,
that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees
in the garden of the world, and that I was
going out into the world with that passion in my
soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived.
My only mistake was that I confined myself so
exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me
the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the
other side for its shadow and its gloom.

m DE PROFUNDIS

Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair,
suffering, tears even, the broken words that
come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one
walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-
abasement that punishes, the misery that puts
ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sack-
cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts
gall: — all these were things of which I was
afraid. And as I had determined to know
nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of
them in turn, to feed on them, to have for
a season, indeed, no other food at all.

I don't regret for a single moment having
lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one
should do everything that one does. There was
no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the
pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went
down the primrose path to the sound of flutes.
I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued
the same life would have been wrong because
it would have been limiting. I had to pass on.
The other half of the garden had its secrets
for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed
and prefigured in my books. Some of it is in

DE PROFUNDIS 61

TJie Happy Prince^ some of it in The Young King,
notably in the passage where the bishop says
to the kneeling boy, *Is not He who made
misery wiser than thou art?' a phrase which
when I wrote it seemed to me little more than
a phrase ; a great deal of it is hidden away in
the note of doom that like a purple thread
runs through the texture of Dorian Gray, in
The Critic as Artist it is set forth in many
colours ; in The Soul of Man it is written down,
and in letters too easy to read ; it is one of the
refrains whose recurring motifs make Salami-
so like a piece of music and bind it together
as a ballad ; in the prose poem of the man who
from the bronze of the image of the * Pleasure
that liveth for a moment' has to make the
image of the 'Sorrow that abideth for ever*
it is incarnate. It could not have been other-
wise. At every single moment of one's hfe
one is what one is going to be no less than
what one has been. Art is a symbol, because
man is a symbol.

It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate
realisation of the artistic life. For the artistic

62 DE PROFUNDIS

life is simply self-development. Humility in
the artist is his frank acceptance of all ex-
periences, just as love in the artist is simply
the sense of beauty that reveals to the world
its body and its soul. In Maiius the Epicurean
Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with
the life of religion, in the deep, sweet, and
austere sense of the word. But Marius is little
more than a spectator: an ideal spectator
indeed, and one to whom it is given 'to con-
template the spectacle of life with appropriate
emotions/ which Wordsworth defines as the
poet's true aim; yet a spectator merely, and
perhaps a little too much occupied with the
comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary to
notice that it is the sanctuary of sorrow that
he is gazing at.

I see a far more intimate and immediate
connection between the true life of Christ and
the true life of the artist ; and I take a keen
pleasure in the reflection that long before sorrow
had made my days her own and bound me to
her wheel I had written in The Soul of Man
that he who would lead a Christ-like life must

DE PROFUNDIS 63

be entirely and absolutely himself, and had
taken as ray types not merely the shepherd
on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell, but
also the painter to whom the world is a pageant
and the poet for whom the world is a song.
I remember saying once to Andre Gide, as we
sat together in some Paris cafe, that while
metaphysics had but little real interest for me,
and morality absolutely none, there was nothing
that either Plato or Christ had said that could
not be transferred immediately into the sphere
of Art and there find its complete fulfilment.

Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ
that close union of personality with perfection
which forms the real distinction between the
classical and romantic movement in life, but
the very basis of his nature was the same as
that of the nature of the artist — an intense and
flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire
sphere of human relations that imaginative
sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole
secret of creation. He understood the leprosy
of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the
fierce misery of those who live for pleasure.

64 DE PROFUNDIS

the strange poverty of the rich. Some one
wrote to me in trouble, * When you are not on
your pedestal you are not interesting.' How
remote was the writer from what Matthew
Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either
would have taught him that whatever happens
to another happens to oneself, and if you want
an inscription to read at dawn and at niglit-
time, and for pleasure or for pain^ write up on
the walls ot your house in letters for the sun
to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever
happens to oneself happens to another.'

Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His
whole conception of humanity sprang right out
of the imagination and can only be realised by
it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to
him. He was the first to conceive the divided
races as a unity. Before his time there had
been gods and men, and, feeling through the
mysticism of sympathy that in himself each had
been made incarnate, he calls himself the Son
of the one or the Son of the other, according to
his mood. More than any one else in history
he wakes in us that temper of wonder to which

DE PROFUNDIS «ft

romance always appeals. There is still some-
thing to me almost incredible in the idea of a
young Galilean peasant imagining that he could
bear on his own shoulders the burden of the
entire world : all that had already been done and
suffered, and all that was yet to be done and
suffered : the sins of Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of
Alexander vi., and of him who was Emperor of
Rome and Priest of the Sun ; the sufferings of
those whose names are legion and whose dwell-
ing is among the tombs : oppressed nationalities,
factory children, thieves, people in prison, out-
casts, those who are dumb under oppression
and whose silence is heard only of God ; and
not merely imagining this but actually achiev-
ing it, so that at the present moment all who
come in contact with his personality, even
though they may neither bow to his altar nor
kneel before his priest, in some way find that
the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the
beauty of their sorrow revealed to them.

I had said of Christ that he ranks with the
poets. That is true. Shelley and Sophocles are
of his company. But his entire life also is the

B

66 DE PR0FUNDI8

most wonderful of poems. For ' pity and terror'
there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek
tragedy to touch it. The absolute purity of the
protagonist raises the entire scheme to a height
of romantic art from which the sufferings of
Thebes and Pelops' line are by their very horror
excluded, and shows how wrong Aristotle was
when he said in his treatise on the drama that
it would be impossible to bear the spectacle
of one blameless in pain. Nor in iEschylus
nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness,
in Shakespeare, the most purely human of all
the great artists, in the whole of Celtic myth
and legend, where the loveliness of the world is
shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a
man is no more than the life of a flower, is there
anything that, for sheer simplicity of pathos
wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic
effect, can be said to equal or even approach
the last act of Christ's passion. The little
supper with his companions, one of whom has
already sold him for a price ; the anguish in the
quiet moon-lit garden; the false friend coming
close to him so as to betray him with a kiss;

DE PROFUhfDIS 97

the friend who still believed in him, and on
whom as on a rock he had hoped to build a
house of refuge for Man, denying him as the
bird cried to the dawn ; his own utter loneliness,
his submission, his acceptance of everything;
and along with it all such scenes as the high
priest of orthodoxy rending his raiment in wrath,
and the magistrate of civil justice calling for
water in the vain hope of cleansing himself of
that stain of innocent blood that makes him
the scarlet figure of history; the coronation
ceremony of sorrow, one of the most wonderful
things in the whole of recorded time ; the
crucifixion of the Innocent One before the eyes
of his mother and of the disciple whom he
loved ; the soldiers gambling and throwing dice
for his clothes ; the terrible death by which
he gave the world its most eternal symbol;
and his final burial in the tomb of the rich
man, his body swathed in Egyptian linen with
costly spices and perfumes as though he had
been a king's son. When one contemplates all
this from the point of view of art alone one
cannot but be grateful that the supreme office

68 DE PROFUNDIS

of the Church should be the playing of the
tragedy without the shedding of blood: the
mystical presentation, by means of dialogue and
costume and gesture even, of the Passion of her
Lord ; and it is always a source of pleasure and
awe to me to remember that the ultimate sur-
vival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to
art, is to be found in the servitor answering the
priest at Mass.

Yet the whole life of Chi-ist — so entirely
may sorrow and beauty be made one in their
meaning and manifestation — is really an idyll,
though it ends with the veil of the temple being
rent, and the darkness coming over the face of
the earth, and the stone rolled to the door of
the sepulchre. One always thinks of him as a
young bridegroom with his companions, as in-
deed he somewhere describes himself; as a
shepherd straying through a valley with his
sheep in search of green meadow or cool stream ;
as a singer trying to build out of the music
the walls of the City of God ; or as a lover for
whose love the whole world was too small. His
miracles seem to me to be as exquisite as the

DE PROFUNDIS m

coming of spring, and quite as natural. I see
no difficulty at all in believing that such was
the charm of his personality that his mere
presence could bring peace to souls in anguish,
and that those who touched his garments or
his hands forgot their pain ; or that as he passed
by on the highway of life people who had seen
nothing of life's mystery saw it clearly, and
others who had been deaf to every voice but
that of pleasure heard for the first time the
voice of love and found it as ' musical as Apollo's
lute ' ; or that evil passions fled at his approach,
and men whose dull unimaginative lives had
been but a mode of death rose as it were from
the grave when he called them; or that when
he taught on the hillside the multitude forgot
their hunger and thirst and the cares of this
world, and that to his friends who listened to
him as he sat at meat the coarse food seemed
delicate, and the water had the taste of good
wine, and the whole house became full of the
odour and sweetness of nard.

Renan in his Fie de Jesus — that gracious fifth
gospel, the gospel according to St. Thomas,

70 DE PROFUNDIS

one might call it — says somewhere that Christ's
great achievement was that he made himself
as much loved after his death as he had been
during his lifetime. And certainly, if his place
is among the poets, he is the leader of all the
lovers. He saw that love was the first secret
of the world for which the wise men had been
looking, and that it was only through love that
one could approach either the heart of the
leper or the feet of God.

And above all, Christ is the most supreme of
individualists. Humility, like the artistic accept-
ance of all experiences, is merely a mode of
manifestation. It is man's soul that Christ is
always looking for. He calls it 'God's King-
dom,' and finds it in every one. He compares
it to little things, to a tiny seed, to a handful
of leaven, to a pearl. That is because one
realises one's soul only by getting rid of all
alien passions, all acquired culture, and all ex-
ternal possessions, be they good or evil.

I bore up against everything with some
stubbornness of will and much rebellion of
nature, till I had absolutely nothing left in

DE PROFUNDIS 71

the world but one thing. I had lost my name,
my position, my happiness, my freedom, my
wealth. I was a prisoner and a pauper. But
I still had my children left. Suddenly they
were taken away from me by the law. It was
a blow so appalling that I did not know what
to do, so I flung myself on my knees, and bowed
my head, and wept, and said, 'The body of a
child is as the body of the Lord: I am not
worthy of either.' That moment seemed to
save me. I saw then that the only thing for
me was to accept everj'thing. Since then —
curious as it will no doubt sound — I have been
happier. It was of course my soul in its ulti-
mate essence that I had reached. In many
ways I had been its enemy, but I found it
waiting for me as a friend. When one comes
in contact with the soul it makes one simple
as a child, as Christ said one should be.

It is tragic how few people ever '^ possess
their souls ' before they die. * Nothing is more
rare in any man,' says Emerson, * than an act of
his own.' It is quite true. Most people are
other people. Their thoughts are some one

78 DE PROFUNDJS

else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their
passions a quotation. Christ was not merely
the supreme individualist, but he was the first
individualist in history. People have tried to
make him out an ordinary philanthropist, or
ranked him as an altruist with the unscientific
and sentimental. But he was really neither one
nor the other. Pity he has, of course, for the
poor, for those who are shut up in prisons, for
the lowly, for the wretched; but he has far
more pity for the rich, for the hard hedonists,
for those who waste their freedom in becoming
slaves to things, for those who wear soft raiment
and live in king's houses. Riches and pleasure
seemed to him to be really greater tragedies
than poverty or sorrow. And as for altruism,
who knew better than he that it is vocation not
volition that determines us, and that one cannot
gather grapes of thorns or figs from thistles ?

To live for others as a definite self-conscious
aim was not his creed. It was not the basis
of his creed. When he says, ' Forgive your
enemies/ it is not for the sake of the enemy,
but for one's own sake that he says so.

DE PROFUNDIS 73

and because love is more beautiful than hate.
In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell
all that thou hast and give to the poor/ it is
not of the state of the poor that he is thinking,
but of the soul of the young man, the soul that
wealth was mairing. In his view of life he is
one with the artist who knows that by the
inevitable law of self-perfection, the poet must
sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the
painter make the world a mirror for his moods,
as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn
must blossom in spring, and the com turn to
gold at harvest-time, and the moon in her
ordered wanderings change from shield to
sickle, and from sickle to shield.

But while Christ did not say to men, ' Live
for others,' he pointed out that there was no
difference at all between the lives of others and
one's own life. By this means he gave to man
an extended, a Titan personality. Since his
coming the history of each separate individual
is, or can be made, the history of the world. Of
course, culture has intensified the personality
of man. Art has made us myriad-minded.

74 DE PROFUNDIS

Those who have the artistic temperament go
into exile with Dante and learn how salt is the
bread of others, and how steep their stairs;
they catch for a moment the serenity and calm
of Goethe, and yet know but too well that
Baudelaire cried to God —

O Seigneur, donnez-moi la force et le courage

De contempler mon corps et men coeur sans dcgout.

Out of Shakespeare's sonnets they draw, to
their own hurt it may be, the secret of his
love and make it their own ; they look with
new eyes on modem life, because they have
listened to one of Chopin's nocturnes, or handled
Greek things, or read the story of the passion
of some dead man for some dead woman whose
hair was like threads of fine gold, and whose
mouth was as a pomegranate. But the sym-
pathy of the artistic temperament is necessarily
with what has found expression. In words or
in colours, in music or in marble, behind the
painted masks of an ^chylean play, or through
some Sicilian shepherds' pierced and jointed
reeds, the man and his message must have
been revealed.

DE PROFUNDIS 76

To the artist, expression is the only mode
under which he can conceive life at aU. To
him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it
was not so. With a width and wonder of
imagination that fills one almost with awe, he
took the entire world of the inarticulate, the
voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and
made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those
of whom I have spoken, who are dumb under
oppression and 'whose silence is heard only of
God/ he chose as his brothers. He sought to
become eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and
a cry in the lips of those whose tongues had
been tied. His desire was to be to the myriads
who had found no utterance a very trumpet
through which they might call to heaven.
And feeling, with the artistic nature of one to
whom suffering and sorrow were modes through
which he could realise his conception of the
beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it
becomes incarnate and is made an image, he made
of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows, and
as such has fascinated and dominated art as no
Greek god ever succeeded in doing.

79 DE PROFUNDIS

For the Greek gods, in spite of the white
and red of their fair fleet limbs, were not
really what they appeared to be. The curved
brow of Apollo was like the sun's disc over
a hill at dawn^ and his feet were as the wings
of the morning, but he himself had been cruel
to Marsyas and had made Niobe childless. In
the steel shields of Athena's eyes there had
been no pity f(Mr Arachne; the pomp and
peacocks of Hera were all that was really noble
about her; and the Father of the Gods him-
self had been too fond of the daughters of men.
The two most deeply suggestive figures of
Greek mythology were, for religion, Demeter,
an earth goddess, not one of the Olympians,
and for art, Dionysos, the son of a mortal
woman to whom the moment of his birth had
proved also the moment of her death.

But Life itself from its lowliest and most
humble sphere produced one far more marvellous
than the mother of Proserpina or the son of
Semele. Out of the Carpenter's shop at
Nazareth had come a personality infinitely
greater than any made by myth and legend.

DE TROFUNDIS 77

and one, strangely enough, destined to reveal
to the world the mystical meaning of wine
and the real beauties of the lilies of the field
as none, either on Cithaeron or at Enna, had
ever done.

The song of Isaiah, * He is despised and re-
jected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief: and we hid as it were our faces
from him,' had seemed to him to prefigure
himself, and in him the prophecy was fulfilled.
We must not be afraid of such a phrase. Every
single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy :
for every work of art is the conversion of an
idea into an image. Every single human being
should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for
every human being should be the realisation of
some ideal, either in the mind of God or in
the mind of man. Christ found the type and
fixed it, and the dream of a Virgilian poet,
either at Jerusalem or at Babylon, became in
the long progress of the centuries incarnate in
him for whom the world was waiting. 'His
visage was so marred more than any man,
and his form more than the sons of men,' are

78 DE PROFUNDIS

among the signs noted by Isaiah as distinguish-
ing the new ideal, and as soon as art understood
what was meant it opened like a flower at the
presence of one in whom truth in art was set
forth as it had never been before. For is not
truth in art, as I have said, ' that in which the
outward is expressive of the inward ; in which
the soul is made flesh and the body instinct
with spirit in which form reveals ' ?

To me one of the things in history the most
to be regretted is that the Christ's own
renaissance which has produced the Cathedral
at Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends,
the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the art of
Giotto, and Dante's Divine Comedy, was not
allowed to develop on its own lines, but was
interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical
Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael's
frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal
French tragedy, and St. Paul's Cathedral, and
Pope's poetry, and everything that is made
from without and by dead rules, and does not
spring from within through some spirit in-
forming it. But wherever there is a romantic

DE PR0FUNDI8 7»

movement in art there somehow, and under
some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He
is in Romeo and Juliet, in the Winter's Tale, in
Provengal poetry, in the Ancient Mariner, in La
Belle Dame sans merci, and in Chatterton's
Ballad oj Charity.

We owe to him the most diverse things and
people. Hugo's Les Mis6rahles, Baudelaire's
Fleurs du Mai, the note of pity in Russian
novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the
stained glass and tapestries and the quattro-
cento work of Bume-Jones and Morris, belong
to him no less than the tower of Giotto,
Lancelot and Guinevere, Tannhauser, the
troubled romantic marbles of Michael Angelo,
pointed architecture, and the love of children
and flowers — for both of which, indeed, in
classical art there was but little place, hardly
enough for them to grow or play in, but which,
from the twelfth century down to our own day,
have been continually making their appearances
in art, under various modes and at various times,
coming fitfully and wilfully, as children, as
flowers, are apt to do: spring always seeming

m DE PROFUNDIS

to one as if the flowers had been in hiding, and
on}y came out into the sun because they were
afraid that gro^vn up people would grow tired
of looking for them and give up the search;
and the life of a child being no more than an
April day on which there is both rain and sun
for the narcissus.

It is the imaginative quality of Christ's own
nature that makes him this palpitating centre
of romance. The strange figures of poetic
drama and ballad are made by the imagination
of others, but out of his own imagination
entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself.
The cry of Isaiah had really no more to do
with his coming than the song of the nightingale
has to do with the rising of the moon — no
more, though perhaps no less. He was the
denial as well as the affirmation of prophecy.
For every expectation that he fulfilled there
was another that he destroyed. * In all beauty,'
says Bacon, 'there is some strangeness of pro-
portion,' and of those who are bom of the
spirit — of those, that is to say, who like himself
are dynamic forces — Christ says that tbey are

DE PROFUNDIS 81

like the wind that 'bloweth where it listeth,
and no man can tell whence it cometh and
whither it goeth,* That is why he is so
fascinating to artists. He has all the colour
elements of life ; mystery, strangeness, pathos,
suggestion, ecstasy, love. He appeals to the
temper of wonder, and creates that mood in
which alone he can be understood.

And to me it is a joy to remember that if
he is 'of imagination all compact,' the world
itself is of the same substance. I said in
Dorian Gray that the great sins of the world
take place in the brain : but it is in the brain
that everything takes place. We know now
that we do not see with the eyes or hear with
the ears. They are really channels for the
transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense
impressions. It is in the brain that the poppy
is red, that the apple is odorous, that the
skylark sings.

Of late I have been studying with diligence
the four prose poems about Christ. At
Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek
Testament, and every morning, after I had

82 DE PR0FUNDI8

cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read
a little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken
by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way
of opening the day. Every one, even in a
turbulent, ill-disciplined life, should do the
same. Endless repetition, in and out of season,
has spoiled for us the freshness, the naivete,
the simple romantic charm of the Gospels. We
hear them read far too often and far too badly,
and all repetition is anti-spiritual. When one
returns to the Greek, it is like going into a
garden of lilies out of some narrow and dark
house.

And to me, the pleasure is doubled by the
reflection that it is extremely probable that we
have the actual terms, the ipsissima verba, used
by Christ. It was always supposed that Christ
talked in Aramaic. Even Renan thought so.
But now we know that the Galilean peasants,
like the Irish peasants of our own day, were
bilingual, and that Greek was the ordinai-y
language of intercourse all over Palestine, as
indeed all over the Eastern world. I never
liked the idea that we knew of Christ's own

DE PROFUNDIS 83

words only through a translation of a transla-
tion. It is a delight to me to think that as
far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides
might have listened to him, and Socrates
reasoned with him, and Plato understood him :
that he really said lyw ei/ii o Troi/i^v o KaXos,
that when he thought of the lilies of the field
and how they neither toil nor spin, his absolute
expression was KaTafidOere to Kpiva tov aypov
TTWs av^avci" ov kotti^ ovSe vrjOei, and that his
last word when he cried out * my life has been
completed, has reached its fulfilment, has been
perfected,' was exactly as St. John tells us it
was : TereAeo-Tat — no more.

While in reading the Gospels — particularly
that of St. John himself, or whatever early
Gnostic took his name and mantle — I see the
continual assertion of the imagination as the
basis of all spiritual and material life, I see
also that to Christ imagination was simply a
form of love, and that to him love was lord
in the fullest meaning of the phrase. Some
six weeks ago I was allowed by the doctor
to have white bread to eat instead of the

84 DE PROFUNDIS

coarse black or bro>vn bread of ordinary prison
fare. It is a great delicacy. It will sound
strange that dry bread could possibly be a
delicacy to any one. To me it is so much so
that at the close of each meal I carefully eat
whatever crumbs may be left on my tin plate,
or have fallen on the rough towel that one
uses as a cloth so as not to soil one's table ;
and I do so not from hunger — I get now quite
sufficient food — but simply in order that nothing
should be wasted of what is given to me. So
one should look on love.

Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had
the power of not merely saying beautiful things
himself, but of making other people say beauti-
ful things to him; and I love the story St.
Mark tells us about the Greek woman, who,
when as a trial of her faith he said to her that
he could not give her the bread of the children
of Israel, answered him that the little dogs —
(Kvi/a/)(a, * little dogs ' it should be rendered) —
who are under the table eat of the crumbs that
the children let fall. Most people live for love
and admiration. But it is by love and admiration

DE PROFUNDIS 86

that we should live. If any love is shown us
we should recognise that we are quite unworthy
of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact
that God loves man shows us that in the divine
order of ideal things it is written that eternal
love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy.
Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to
bear, let us say that every one is worthy of love,
except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and
Domine, non sum dignus should be on the lips and
in the hearts of those who receive it.

If ever I write again, in the sense of producing
artistic work, there are just two subjects on which
and through which I desire to express myself :
one is * Christ as the precursor of the romantic
movement in life ' : the other is * The artistic
life considered in its relation to conduct.' The
first is, of course, intensely fascinating, for I see
in Christ not merely the essentials of the
supreme romantic type, but all the accidents,
the wilfulnesses even, of the romantic tempera-
ment also. He was the first person who ever
said to people that they should live ' flower-like

86 1>E PROFUNDIS

lives.* He fixed the phrase. He took children
as the type of what people should try to become.
He held them up as examples to their elders,
which I myself have always thought the chief
use of children, if what is perfect should have a
use. Dante describes the soul of a man as
coming from the hand of God * weeping and
laughing like a little child,' and Christ also saw
that the soul of each one should be a guisa di
fanciulla eke piatigendo e ridendo pargoleggia. He
felt that life was changeful, fluid, active, and
that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form
was death. He saw that people should not be
too serious over material, common interests ;
that to be unpractical was to be a great thing :
that one should not bother too much over affairs.
The birds didn't, why should man? He is
charming when he says, ' Take no thought for
the morrow ; is not the soul more than meat ? is
not the body more than raiment ? ' A Greek
might have used the latter phrase. It is full of
Greek feeling. But only Christ could have
said both, and so summed up life perfectly
for us.

DE PROFUNDIS 87

His morality is all sympathy, just what
morality should be. If the only thing that he
ever said had been, ' Her sins are forgiven her
because she loved much,' it would have been
worth while dying to have said it. His justice
is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should
be. The beggar goes to heaven because he
has been unhappy. I cannot conceive a better
reason for his being sent there. The people who
work for an hour in the vineyard in the cool of
the evening receive just as much reward as those
who have toiled there all day long in the hot
sun. Why shouldn't they? Probably no one
deserved anything. Or perhaps they were a
different kind of people. Christ had no patience
with the dull lifeless mechanical systems that
treat people as if they were things, and so treat
everybody alike : for him there were no laws :
there were exceptions merely, as if anybody, or
anything, for that matter, was like aught else
in the world !

Tliat which is the very keynote of romantic
art was to him the proper basis of natural life.
He saw no other basis. And when they brought

8B DE PR0FUNDI8

him one taken in the very act of sin and showed
him her sentence written in the hiw, and asked
him what was to be done^ he wrote with his
finger on the ground as though he did not hear
them, and finally, when they pressed him again,
looked up and said, ' Let him of you who has
never sinned be the first to throw the stone at
her.' It was worth while living to have said
that

Like all poetical natures he loved ignorant
people. He knew that in the soul of one who
is ignorant there is always room for a great idea.
But he could not stand stupid people, especially
those who are made stupid by education :
people who are full of opinions not one of which
they even understand, a peculiarly modem type,
summed up by Christ when he describes it as
the type of one who has the key of knowledge,
cannot use it himself, and does not allow other
people to use it, though it may be made to open
the gate of God's Kingdom. His chief war was
against the Philistines. That is the war every
child of light has to wage. Philistinism was the
note of the age and community in which he

DE PROFUNDIS 89

lived. In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas,
their dull respectability, their tedious orthodoxy,
their worship of vulgar success, their entire
preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of
life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves
and their importance, the Jews of Jerusalem in
Christ's day were the exact counterpart of the
British Philistine of our own. Christ mocked at
the ' whited sepulchre ' of respectability, and
fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly
success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He
saw nothing in it at all. He looked on wealth
as an encumbrance to a man. He would not
hear of life being sacrificed to any system of
thought or morals. He pointed out that forms
and ceremonies were made for man, not man for
forms and ceremonies. He took Sabbatarianism
as a type of the things that should be set at
nought. The cold philanthropies, the ostenta-
tious public charities, the tedious formalisms so
dear to the middle-class mind, he exposed with
utter and relentless scorn. To us, what is termed
orthodoxy is merely a facile unintelligent acquies-
cence ; but to them, and in their hands, it was

90 DE PROFUNDIS

a terrible and paralysing tyranny. Christ swept
it aside. He showed that the spirit alone was
of value. He took a keen pleasure in pointing
out to them that though they were always read-
ing the law and the prophets, they had not
really the smallest idea of what either of them
meant. In opposition to their tithing of each
separate day into the fixed routine of prescribed
duties, as they tithe mint and rue, he preached
the enormous importance of living completely
for the moment.

Those whom he saved from their sins are
saved simply for beautiful moments in their
lives. Mary Magdalen, when she sees Christ,
breaks the rich vase of alabaster that one of her
seven lovers had given her, and spills the odorous
spices over his tired dusty feet, and for that one
moment's sake sits for ever with Ruth and
Beatrice in the tresses of the snow-white rose
of Paradise. All that Christ says to us by the
way of a little warning is that every moment
should be beautiful, that the soul should always
be ready for the coming of the bridegroom,
always waiting for the voice of the lover.

DE PR0FUNDI8 01

Philistinism being simply that side of man's
nature that is not illumined by the imagination.
He sees all the lovely influences of life as modes
of light : the imagination itself is the world of
light. The world is made by it, and yet the
world cannot understand it : that is because the
imagination is simply a manifestation of love,
and it is love and the capacity for it that dis-
tinguishes one human being from another.

But it is when he deals with a sinner that
Christ is most romantic, in the sense of most
real. The world had always loved the saint as
being the nearest possible approach to the
perfection of God. Christ, through some divine
instinct in him, seems to have always loved the
sinner as being the nearest possible approach to
the perfection of man. His primary desire was
not to reform people, any more than his primary
desire was to relieve suflering. To turn an
interesting thief into a tedious honest man was
not his aim. He would have thought little of
the Prisoners' Aid Society and other modem
movements of the kind. The conversion of a
publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed

M DE PROFUNDIS

to him a great achievement. But in a manner
not yet understood of the world he regarded
sin and suffering as being in themselves beauti-
ful holy things and modes of perfection.

It seems a very dangerous idea. It is — all
great ideas are dangerous. That it was Christ's
creed admits of no doubt. That it is the true
creed I don't doubt myself.

Of course the sinner must repent. But why ?
Simply because otherwise he would be unable to
realise what he had done. The moment of
repentance is the moment of initiation. More
than that : it is the means by which one alters
one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible.
They often say in their Gnomic aphorisms, ' Even
the Gods cannot alter the past.' Christ showed
that the commonest sinner could do it, that it
was the one thing he could do. Christ, had he
been asked, would have said — I feel quite certain
about it — that the moment the prodigal son fell
on his knees and wept, he made his having
wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-
herding and hungering for the husks they ate,
beautiful and holy moments in his life. It is

DE PROFUNDIS 99

difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I
dare say one has to go to prison to understand
it. If so, it may be worth while going to prison.
There is something so unique about Christ.
Of course just as there are false dawns before
the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden
sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus
into squandering its gold before its time, and
make some foolish bird call to its mate to build
on barren boughs, so there were Christians before
Christ. For that we should be grateful. The
unfortunate thing is that there have been none
since. I make one exception, St. Francis of
AssisL But then God had given him at his
birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when
quite young had in mystical marriage taken
poverty as his bride: and with the soul of a
poet and the body of a beggar he found the
way to perfection not difficult. He understood
Christ, and so he became like him. We do not
require the Liber Conformitatum to teach us
that the life of St. Francis was the true ImitaUo
Christi, a poem compared to which the book of
that name is merely prose.

M DE PROFUNDIS

Indeed^ that is the charm about Christ, when
all is said : he is just like a work of art. He
does not really teach one anything, but by being
brought into his presence one becomes some-
thing. And everybody is predestined to his
presence. Once at least in his life each man
walks with Christ to Emmaus.

As regards the other subject, the Relation of
the Artistic Life to Conduct, it will no doubt
seem strange to you that I should select it.
People point to Reading Gaol and say, 'That
is where the artistic life leads a man.' Well, it
might lead to worse places. The more mechani-
cal people to whom life is a shrewd speculation
depending on a careful calculation of ways and
means, always know where they are going, and
go there. They start with the ideal desire of
being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere
they are placed they succeed in being the parish
beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to
be something separate from himself, to be a
member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or
a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something
equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being

DE PROFUNDIS 95

what he wants to be. That is his punishment.
Those who want a mask have to wear it.

But with the dynamic forces of life, and those
in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate,
it is different. People whose desire is solely for
self-realisation never know where they are going.
They can't know. In one sense of the word it
is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said,
to know oneself: that is the first achievement
of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul
of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achieve-
ment of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself.
When one has weighed the sun in the balance,
and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped
out the seven heavens star by star, there still
remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of
his own soul ? When the son went out to look
for his father's asses, he did not know that a
man of God was waiting for him with the very
chrism of coronation, and that his own soul was
already the soul of a king.

I hope to live long enough and to produce
work of such a character that I shall be able at
the end of my days to say, ' Yes ! this is just

96 DE PR0FUNDI8

where the artistic life leads a man ! ' Two of
the most perfect lives I have come across in my
own experience are the lives of Verlaine and of
Prince Kropotkin : both of them men who have
passed years in prison : the first, the one Chris-
tian poet since Dante ; the other, a man with a
soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems
coming out of Russia. And for the last seven or
eight months, in spite of a succession of great
troubles reaching me from the outside world
almost without intermission, I have been placed
in direct contact with a new spirit working in
this prison tlirough man and things, that has
helped me beyond any possibility of expression
in words : so that while for the first year of my
imprisonment I did nothing else, and can
remember doing nothing else, but wring my
hands in impotent despair, and say, 'What an
ending, what an appalling ending!' now I try
to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not
torturing myself do really and sincerely say,
* What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning !'
It may really be so. It may become so. If it
does I shall owe much to this new person-

DE PROFUNDIS 97

ality that has altered every man's life in this
place.

You may realise it when I say that had I been
released last May, as I tried to be, I would have
left this place loathing it and every official in it
with a bitterness of hatred that would have
poisoned my life. I have had a year longer of
imprisonment, but humanity has been in the
prison along with us all, and now when I go out
I shall always remember great kindnesses that
I have received here from almost everybody,
and on the day of my release I shall give many
thanks to many people, and ask to be remem-
bered by them in turn.

The prison style is absolutely and entirely
wrong. I would give anything to be able to
alter it when I go out. I intend to try. But
there is nothing in the world so wrong but that
the spirit of humanity, which is the spirit of
love, the spirit of the Christ who is not in
churches, may make it, if not right, at least
possible to be borne without too much bitterness
of heart.

I know also that much is waiting for me

G

98 DE PROFUNDIS

outside that is very delightful, from what
St. Francis of Assisi calls ' my brother the wind,
and my sister the rain,* lovely things both of
them, down to the shop-windows and sunsets of
great cities. If I made a list of all that still
remains to me, I don't know where I should
stop: for, indeed, God made the world just as
much for me as for any one else. Perhaps 1
may go out with something that I had not got
before. I need not tell you that to me reforma-
tions in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as
Reformations in theology. But while to propose
to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant,
to have become a deeper man is the privilege of
those who have suffered. And such I think I
have become.

If after I am free a friend of mine gave a
feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not
mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself.
With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon,
who could not be perfectly happy? Besides,
feasts are not for me any more. I have given
too many to care about them. That side of life
is over for me, very fortunately, 1 dare say.

DR PROFUNDIS = 99

But if after I am free a friend of mine had a
sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I
should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the
doors of the house of mourning against me, I
would come back again and again and beg to be
admitted, so that I might share in what I was
entitled to share in. If he thought me un-
worthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it
as the most poignant humiliation, as the most
terrible mode in which disgrace could be
inflicted on me. But that could not be. I
have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can
look at the loveliness of the world and share its
sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of
both, is in immediate contact with divine things,
and has got as near to God's secret as any one
can get.

Perhaps there may come into my art also, no
less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of
greater unity of passion, and directness of im-
pulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim
of modern art. We are no longer in art
concerned with the type. It is with the
exception that we have to do. I cannot put my

MK) DE PROFUNDIS

sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly
say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but
something must come into my woric, of fuller
memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of
more curious effects, of simpler architectural
order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.

When Marsyas was * torn from the scabbard
of his limbs ' — delle vagitia dell membra sue, to
use one of Dante's most terrible Tacitean
phrases — ^he had no more song, the Greek said.
Apollo had been victor. The lyre had van-
quished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks
were mistaken. I hear in much modern Art
the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire,
sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in
Verlaine. It is in the deferred resolutions of
Chopin's music. It is in the discontent that
haunts Burne-Jones's women. Even Matthew
Arnold, whose song of Callicles tells of 'the
triumph of the sweet persuasive lyre,' and the
'famous final victory,' in such a clear note of
lyrical beauty, has not a little of it; in the
troubled undertone of doubt and distress that
haunts his verses, neither Goethe nor Words-

DE PROFUNDIS Mt

worth could help him, though he followed each
in turn, and when he seeks to mourn for TkyrsU
or to sing of the Scholar Gipsy, it is the reed
that he has to take for the rendering of his
strain. But whether or not the Phrygian Faun
was silent, I cannot be. Expression is as neces-
sary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black
branches of the trees that show themselves
above the prison walls and are so restless in the
wind. Between my art and the world there is
now a wide gulf, but between art and myself
there is none. I hope at least that there is none.
To each of us different fates are meted out.
My lot has been one of public infamy, of long
imprisonment, of misery, of ruin, of disgrace,
but I am not worthy of it — not yet, at any rate.
I remember that I used to say that I thought I
could bear a real tragedy if it came to me with
purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that
.the dreadful thing about modernity was that it
put tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that
the great realities seemed commonplace or
grotesque or lacking in style. It is quite true
about modernity. It has probably always been

«tt DE PROFUNDIS

true about actual life. It is said that all martyr
doms seemed mean to the looker on. The
nineteenth century is no exception to the rule.

Everything about my tragedy has been hide-
ous, mean, repellent, lacking in style ; our very
dress makes us grotesque. We are the zanies of
sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.
We are specially designed to appeal to the sense
of humour. On November 13th, 1895, I was
brought down here from London. From two
o'clock till half-past two on that day I had to
stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction
in convict dress, and handcuffed, for the world
to look at. I had been taken out of the hospital
ward without a moment's notice being given to
me. Of all possible objects I was the most
grotesque. When people saw me they laughed.
Each train as it came up swelled the audience.
Nothing could exceed their amusement. That
was, of course, before they knew who I was. As
soon as they had been informed they laughed
still more. For half an hour I stood there in
the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering
mob.

DE PROFUNDIS 103

For a year after that was done to me I wept
every day at the same hour and for the same
space of time. That is not such a tragic thing
as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are
in prison tears are a part of every day's experi-
ence. A day in prison on which one does not
weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not
a day on which one's heart is happy.

Well, now I am really beginning to feel more
regret for the people who laughed than for
myself. Of course when they saw me I was not
on my pedestal, I was in the pillory. But it is
a very unimaginative nature that only cares for
people on their pedestals. A pedestal may be
a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific
reality. They should have known also how to
interpret sorrow better. I have said that behind
sorrow there is always sorrow. It were wiser
still to say that behind sorrow there is always a
soul. And to mock at a soul in pain is a dread-
ful thing. In the strangely simple economy of
the world people only get what they give, and
to those who have not enough imagination to
penetrate the mere outward of things, and

104 DE PROFUNDIS

feel pity, what pity can be given save that of
scorn?

I write this account of the mode of my being
transferred here simply that it should be realised
how hard it has been for me to get anything out
of my punishment but bitterness and despair. I
have, however, to do it, and now and then I
have moments of submission and acceptance.
All the spring may be hidden in the single bud,
and the low ground nest of the lark may hold
the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-
red dawns. So perhaps whatever beauty of life
8till remains to me is contained in some moment
of surrender, abasement, and humiliation. I
can, at any rate, merely proceed on the lines of
my own development, and, accepting all that
has happened to me, make myself worthy of it.

People used to say of me that I was too
individualistic. I must be far more of an
individualist than ever I was. I must get far
more out of myself than ever I got, and ask far
less of the world than ever I asked. Indeed,
my ruin came not from too great individualism
of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful.

DE PROFUNDIS 105

unpardonable, and to all time contemptible
action of my life was to allow myself to appeal
to society for help and protection. To have
made such an appeal would have been from the
individualist point of view bad enough, but what
excuse can there ever be put forward for having
made it ? Of course once I had put into motion
the forces of society, society turned on me and
said, * Have you been living all this time in
defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to
those laws for protection ? You shall have those
laws exercised to the full. You shall abide by
what you have appealed to.* The result is I am
in gaol. Certainly no man ever fell so ignobly,
and by such ignoble instruments, as I did. I
say in Dorian Gray somewhere that 'A man
cannot be too careful in the choice of his
enemies.' I little thought that it was by a
pariah I was to be made a pariah myself.

The Philistine element in life is not the
failure to understand art. Charming people,
such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys, pea-
sants and the like, know nothing about art, and
are the very salt of the earth. He is the

106 DE PROFUNDIS

Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy,
cumbrous, blind^ mechanical forces of society,
and who does not recognise dynamic force
when he meets it either in a man or a move-
ment.

People thought it dreadful of me to have
entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and
to have found pleasure in their company. But
then, from the point of view through which I,
as an artist in life, approach them they were
delightfully suggestive and stimulating. It was
like feasting with panthers ; the danger was half
the excitement. I used to feel as a snake-
charmer must feel when he lures the cobra to
stir from the painted cloth or reed basket that
holds it and makes it spread its hood at his
bidding and sway to and fro in the air as a plant
sways restfully in a stream. They were to me
the brightest of gilded snakes, their poison was
part of their perfection. I did not know that
when they were to strike at me it was to be at
another's piping and at another's pay. I don't
feel at all ashamed at having known them, they
were intensely interesting; what I do feel

DE PROFUNDIS 107

ashamed of is the horrible Philistine atmosphere
into which I was brought. My business as an
artist was with Ariel, I set myself to wrestle
with Caliban. Instead of making beautiful
coloured musical things such as Salome and the
Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane, I
forced myself to send long lawyer's letters and
was constrained to appeal to the very things
against which I had always protested. Clibbom
and Atkins were wonderful in their infamous
war against life. To entertain them was an
astounding adventure ; Dumas pere, Cellini^ Goya,
Edgar Allan Foe, or Baudelaire would have done
just the same. What is loathsome to me is the
memory of interminable visits paid by me to the

solicitor H , when in the ghastly glare of a

bleak room I would sit with a serious face tell-
ing serious lies to a bald man till I really groaned
and yawned with ennui. There is where I found
myself, right in the centre of Philistia, away
from everything that was beautiful or brilliant
or wonderful or daring. I had come forward as
the champion of respectability in conduct, of
puritanism in life, and of morality in art. Foila

108 DE PROFUNDIS

ou menenl les mauvais chemins . . , but I can
think with gratitude of those who by kindness
without stint, devotion without limit, cheerful-
ness and joy in giving have lightened ray black
burden for me, have visited me again and again,
have written to me beautiful and sympathetic
letters, have managed my affairs for me, arranged
my future life, and stood by me in the teeth of
obloquy, taunt and open sneer, or insult even.
I owe everything to them. The very books in
ray cell are paid for by out of his pocket-
money; from the same source are to come
clothes for me when I am released. I am not
ashamed of taking a thing that is given in love
and affection ; I am proud of it. Yes, I think

of my friends, such as More Adey, R , Robert

Sherard, Frank Harris, Arthur Clifton, and what
they have been to me, in giving me help, affec-
tion, and sympathy. I think of every single
person who has been kind to me in my prison
life down to the warder who gives me a * Good-
morning ' and a * Good-night ' (not one of his pre-
scribed duties) down to the common policemen
who, in their homely, rough way strove to com-

DE PROFUNDIS 109

fort me on ray journeys to and fro from the
Bankruptcy Court under conditions of terrible
mental distress — down to the poor thief who
recognising me as we tramped round the yard
at Wandsworth, whispered to me in the hoarse
prison voice men get from long and compulsory
silence : ' I am sorry for you ; it is harder for the
likes of you than it is for the likes of us.'

A great friend of mine — a friend of ten years*
standing — came to see me some time ago, and
told me that he did not believe a single word
of what was said against me, and wished me to
know that he considered me quite innocent, and
the victim of a hideous plot. I burst into tears
at what he said, and told him that while there
was much amongst the definite charges that was
quite untrue and transferred to me by revolting
malice, still that my life had been full of per-
verse pleasures, and that unless he accepted that
as a fact about me and realised it to the full I
could not possibly be friends with him any more,
or ever be in his company. It was a terrible
shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not
got his friendship on false pretences. I have

110 DE PROFUNDIS

said to you to speak the truth is a painful
thing. To be forced to tell lies is much
worse.

I remember that as I was sitting in the Dock
on the occasion of my last trial listening to Lock-
wood's appalling denunciation of me — like a
thing out of Tacitus, hke a passage in Dante,
like one of Savonarola's indictments of the Popes
of Rome — and being sickened with horror at
what I heard, suddenly it occurred to me, How
splendid it would be, if I was saying all this about
myself. I saw then at once that what is said of
a man is nothing. The point is, who says it. A
man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt
at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his
breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

Emotional forces, as I say somewhere in
Intentions^ are as limited in extent and duration
as the forces of physical energy. The little cup
that is made to hold so much can hold so much
and no more, though all the purple vats of Bur-
gundy be filled with wine to the brim, and the
treaders stand knee-deep in the gathered grapes
of the stony vineyards of Spain. There is no

DE PROFUNDIS 111

error more common than that of thmking that
those who are the causes or occasions of great
tragedies share in the feelings suitable to the
tragic mood : no error more fatal than expecting
it of them. The martyr in his ' shirt of flame '
may be looking on the face of God, but to him
who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs
for the blast the whole scene is no more than
the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or the
felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the
forest, or the fall of a flower to one who is
mowing doMOi the grass with a scythe. Great
passions are for the great of soul, and great
events can be seen only by those who are on a
level with them. We think we can have our
emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the
finest and the most self-sacrificing emotions have
to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what
makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional
life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair.
Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of
circulating library of thought — the Zeitgeist of an
age that has no soul and send them back soiled
at the end of each week — so they always try to

Ill DE PROFUNDIS

get their emotions on credit, or refuse to pay the
bill when it comes in. We must pass out of that
conception of life ; as soon as we have to pay for
an emotion we shall know its quality and be
the better for such knowledge. Remember that
the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart.
Indeed sentimentality is merely the Bank-holi-
day of cynicism. And delightful as cynicism is
from its intellectual side, now that it has left the
tub for the club, it never can be more than the
perfect philosophy for a man who has no soul.
It has its social value ; and to an artist all modes
of expression are interesting, but in itself it is a
poor affair, for to the true cynic nothing is ever
revealed.

• •••••

I know of nothing in all drama more incompar-
able from the point of view of art, nothing more
suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than
Shakespeare's drawing of Rozencrantz and Guil-
denstem. They are Hamlet's college friends.
They have been his companions. They bring
with them memories of pleasant days together.
At the moment when they come across him in

DE PROFUNDIS 113

the play he is staggering under the weight of a
burden intolerable to one of his temperament.
The dead have come armed out of the grave to
impose on him a mission at once too great and
too mean for him. He is a dreamer, and he is
called upon to act. He has the nature of the
poet, and he is asked to grapple with the
common complexity of cause and effect, with life
in its practical realisation, of which he knows
nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of
which he knows so much. He has no conception
of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly.
Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the
sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but
the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the
hiding of weakness. In the making of fancies
and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps
playing with action as an artist plays with a
theory. He makes himself the spy ot his proper
actions, and listening to his own words knows
them to be but * words, words, words.' Instead
of trying to be the hero of his own history, he
seeks to be the spectator of his own tragedy.
He disbelieves in everything, including himself

lU DE PROFUNDIS

and yet his doubt helps him not, as U comes
not from scepticism but from a divided will.

Of all this Guildenstem and Rosencrantz
realise nothing. They bow and smirk and
smile, and what the one says the other echoes
with sickliest intonation. When, at last, by
means of the play within the play, and the
puppets in their dalliance, Hamlet ' catches the
conscience ' of the King, and drives the wretched
man in terror from his throne, Guildenstern and
Rosencrantz see no more in his conduct than a
rather painful breach of Court etiquette. That
is as far as they can attain to in ' the contempla-
tion of the spectacle of life with appropriate
emotions.' They are close to his very secret
and know nothing of it. Nor would there be
any use in telling them. They are the little
cups that can hold so much and no more.
Towards the close it is suggested that, caught
in a cunning spring set for another, they have
met, or may meet, with a violent and sudden
death. But a tragic ending of this kind, though
touched by Hamlet's humour with something of
the surprise and justice of comedy, is really not

DE PROFUNDIS 116

for such as they. They never die. Horatio,
who in order to 'report Hamlet and his cause
aright to the unsatisfied,'

Absents him from felicity a while.

And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,

dies, though not before an audience, and leaves no
brother. But Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are
as immortal as Angelo and Tartuffe, and should
rank with them. They are what modem life
has contributed to the antique ideal of friend-
ship. He who writes a new De Amicitia must
find a niche for them, and praise them in Tusculan
prose. They are types fixed for all time. To
censure them would show 'a lack of apprecia-
tion.' They are merely out of their sphere :
that is all. In sublimity of soul there is no con-
tagion. High thoughts and high emotions are
by their very existence isolated.

I am to be released, if all goes well with me,
towards the end of May, and hope to go at once

to some little seaside village abroad with R

and M .

The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays

116 DE PROFUNDIS

about Iphigeneia^ washes away the stains and
wounds of the world.

I hope to be at least a month with my friends,
and to gain peace and balance, and a less troubled
heart, and a sweeter mood ; and then if I feel

able I shall arrange through R to go to

some quiet foreign town like Bruges, whose
grey houses and green canals and cool still ways
had a charm for me years ago. I have a strange
longing for the great simple primeval things,
such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than
the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at
Nature too much, and live with her too little. I
discern great sanity in the Greek attitude.
They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed
whether the shadows on the grass were really
mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was
for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the
runner. They loved the trees for the shadow
that they cast, and the forest for its silence at
noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair
with ivy that he might keep off the rays of the
sun as he stooped over the young shoots, and for
the artist and the athlete, the two types that

DE PR0FUND18 U7

Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the
leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild
parsley, which else had been of no service to
men.

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not
know the uses of any single thing. We have
forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify,
and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a
consequence our art is of the moon and plays
with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and
deals directly with things. I feel sure that in
elemental forces there is purification, and I
want to go back to them and live in their

presence.

• • • •

It is not for nothing or to no purpose that
in my lifelong cult of literatiu*e I have made
myself

Miser of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midaa of his coinage.

I must not be afraid of the past ; if people tell
me that it is irrevocable I shall not believe
them ; the past, the present, and the future are
one moment in the sight of God, in whose sight

118 DE PROFUNDIS

we should try to live. Time and space, succes-
sion and extension, are merely accidental condi-
tions of thought ; the Imagination can transcend
them and move in a free sphere of ideal exist-
ences. Things also are in their essence of what
we choose to make them ; a thing is according
to the mode in which we look at it. 'Where
others/ says Blake, *see but the dawn coming
over the hill, I see the sons of God shouting for
joy.' What seemed to the world and to myself
my future I lost when I allowed myself to be
taunted into taking action against Queensberry ;
I dare say I lost it really long before that. What
lies before me is my past. I have got to make
myself look on that with different eyes, to make
God look on it with different eyes. This I cannot
do by ignoring it, or slighting it, or praising it,
or denying it ; it is only to be done by accepting
it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my
life and character : by bowing my head to every-
thing I have suffered. How far I am away from
the true temper of soul, this letter in its chang-
ing uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its
aspirations and its failure to realise those aspira-

DE PR0FUNDI8 119

tions, shows quite clearly ; bat do not forget in
what a terrible school I am sitting at my task,
and incomplete, imperfect as I am, my friends
have still much to gain. They came to me to
learn the pleasure of life and the pleasure of art
Perhaps I am chosen to teach them something
more wonderful, the meaning of sorrow and its
beauty.

Of course to one so modem as I am, ' enfant
de men si^cle/ merely to look at the world will
be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when
I think that on the very day of my leaving prison
both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming
in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir
into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one,
and make the other toss the pale purple of its
plumes so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.
Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when
he saw for the first time the long heath of some
English upland made yellow with the tawny
aromatic blossoms of the common furze ; and I
know that for me, to whom flowers are part of
desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of
some rose. It has always been so with me

120 DE PROFUNDIS

from my boyhood. There is not a single colour
hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the
curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle
sympathy with the very soul of things, my
nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have
always been one of those 'pour qui le monde
visible existe.'

Still, 1 am conscious now that behind all this
beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is
some spirit hidden of which the painted forms
and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and
it is with this spirit that I desire to become in
harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate
utterances of men and things. The Mystical
in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in
Nature — this is what I am looking for. It
is absolutely necessary for me to find it some-
where.

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all
sentences are sentences of death ; and three
times have I been tried. The first time I left
the box to be arrested, the second time to be
led back to the house of detention, the third
time to pass into a prison for two years. Society,

DE PROFUNDIS 121

as we have constituted it, will have no place for
me, has none to offer ; but Nature, whose sweet
rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts
in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys
in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She
will hang the night with stars so that I may
walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling,
and send the wind over my footprints so that
none may track me to my hurt : she will cleanse
me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make
me whole.

The foUovnriff letters are included by the courtety of

the Editor and Proprietors of the ' Daily Chronicle,'

to whom the copyright belongs

TWO LETTERS TO THE DAILY
CHRONICLE ON PRISON LIFE

L The Case of Warder Martin : Some
Cruelties of Prison Life *

TBE EDITOR OF THE 'DAILY CHRONICLE.'

SIR, — I learn with great regret, through the
columns of your paper^ that the warder
Martin, of Reading Prison, has been dismissed
by the Prison Commissioners for having given
some sweet biscuits to a little hungry child. I
saw the three children myself on the Monday
preceding my release. They had just bees
convicted, and were standing in a row in the
central hall in their prison dress, carrying their
sheets under their arms previous to their being
sent to the cells allotted to them. I happened
to be passing along one of the galleries on my
way to the reception room, where I was to have

1 May 28, 1897.

ISS

124 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

an interview with a friend. They were quite
small children, the youngest — the one to whom
the warder gave the biscuits — being a tiny little
chap, for whom they had evidently been unable
to find clothes small enough to fit. I had, of
course, seen many children in prison during the
two years during which I was myself confined.
Wandsworth Prison especially contained always
a large number of children. But the little child
I saw on the afternoon of Monday the 17th, at
Reading, was tinier than any one of them. I
need not say how utterly distressed I was to
see these children at Reading, for I knew the
treatment in store for them. The cruelty that
is practised by day and night on children in
English prisons is incredible, except to those
that have witnessed it and are aware of the
brutality of the system.

People nowadays do not understand what
cruelty is. They regard it as a sort of terrible
mediaeval passion, and connect it with the race
of men like Eccelin da Romano, and others, to
whom the deliberate infliction of pain gave a
real madness of pleasure. But men of the

THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 126

stamp of Eccelin are merely abnormal types ot
perverted individualism. Ordinary cruelty is
simply stupidity. It is the entire want of
imagination. It is the result in our days of
stereotyped systems, of hard-and-fast rules, and
of stupidity. Wherever there is centralisation
there is stupidity. What is inhuman in modem
life is officialism. Authority is as destructive to
those who exercise it as it is to those on whom
it is exercised. It is the Prison Board, and the
system that it carries out, that is the primary
soiu"ce of the cruelty that is exercised on a child
in prison. The people who uphold the system
have excellent intentions. Those who carry it
out are humane in intention also. Responsi-
bility is shifted on to the disciplinary regula-
tions. It is supposed that because a thing is
the rule it is right.

The present treatment of children is terrible,
primarily from people not understanding the
peculiar psychology of a child's nature, A child
can understand a punishment inflicted by an
individual, such as a parent or guardian, and
bear it with a certain amount of acquiescence.

126 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

What it cannot understand is a punishment
inflicted by society. It cannot realise what
society is. With grown people it is, of course,
the reverse. Those of us who are either in
prison or have been sent there, can understand,
and do understand, what that collective force
called society means, and whatever we may
think of its methods or claims, we can force
ourselves to accept it. Punishment inflicted on
us by an individual, on the other hand, is a
thing that no grown person endures, or is
expected to endure.

The child consequently, being taken away
from its parents by people whom it has never
seen, and of whom it knows nothing, and find-
ing itself in a lonely and unfamiliar cell, waited
on by strange faces, and ordered about and
punished by the representatives of a system
that it cannot understand, becomes an immediate
prey to the first and most prominent emotion
produced by modern prison life — the emotion of
terror. The terror of a child in prison is quite
limitless. I remember once in Reading, as I
was going out to exercise, seeing in the dimly

THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 127

lit cell right opposite my own a small boy. Two
warders — not unkindly men — were talking to
him, with some sternness apparently, or perhaps
giving him some useful advice about his conduct.
One was in the cell with him, the other was
standing outside. The child's face wag like a
white wedge of sheer terror. There was in his
eyes the terror of a hunted animal. The next
morning I heard him at breakfast-time crying,
and calling to be let out. His cry was for his
parents. From time to time I could hear the
deep voice of the warder on duty telling him
to keep quiet. Yet he was not even convicted
of whatever little offence he had been charged
with. He was simply on remand. That I knew
by his wearing his own clothes, which seemed
neat enough. He was, however, wearing prison
socks and shoes. This showed that he was a
very poor boy, whose own shoes, if he had any,
were in a bad state. Justices and magistrates,
an entirely ignorant class as a rule, often remand
children for a week, and then perhaps remit
whatever sentence they are entitled to pass.
They call this 'not sending a child to prison.'

128 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

It is, of course, a stupid view on their part. To
a little child, whether he is in prison on remand
or after conviction is not a subtlety of social
position he can comprehend. To him the
horrible thing is to be there at all. In the
eyes of humanity it should be a hon-ible thing
for him to be there at all.

This terror that seizes and dominates the
child, as it seizes the grown man also, is of
course intensified beyond power of expression
by the solitary cellular system of our prisons.
Every child is confined to its cell for twenty-
three hours out of the twenty-four. This is
the appalling thing. To shut up a child in a
dimly lit cell, for twenty-three hours out of the
twenty-four, is an example of the cruelty of
stupidity. If an individual, parent or guardian,
did this to a child, he would be severely
punished. The Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children would take the matter up
at once. There would be on all hands the
utmost detestation of whomsoever had been
guilty of such cruelty. A heavy sentence
would, undoubtedly, follow conviction. But

THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 129

our own actual society does worse itself, and
to the child to be so treated by a strange
abstract force, of whose claims it has no cognis-
ance, is much worse than it would be to receive
the same treatment from its father or mother,
or some one it knew. The inhuman treatment
of a child is always inhuman, by whomsoever it
is inflicted. But inhuman treatment by society
is to the child the more terrible because there
is no appeal. A parent or guardian can be
moved, and let out a child from the dark lonely
room in which it is confined. But a warder
cannot. Most warders are very fond of chil-
dren. But the system prohibits them from
rendering the child any assistance. Should
they do so, as Warder Martin did, they are
dismissed.

The second thing from which a child suffers
in prison is hunger. The food that is given to
it consists of a piece of usually badly-baked
prison bread and a tin of water for breakfast
at half-past seven. At twelve o'clock it gets
dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal
stirabout; and at half-past five it gets a piece
I

130 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

of dry bread and a tin of water for its supper.
This diet in the case of a strong grown man is
always productive of illness of some kind^ chiefly,
of course, diarrhoea, with its attendant weakness.
In fact, in a big prison astringent medicines are
served out regularly by the warders as a matter
of course. In the case of a child, the child is,
as a rule, incapable of eating the food at all.
Any one who knows anything about children
knows how easily a child's digestion is upset by
a fit of crying, or trouble and mental distress of
any kind. A child who has been crying all day
long, and perhaps half the night, in a lonely
dimly lit cell, and is preyed upon by terror,
simply cannot eat food of this coarse, horrible
kind. In the case of the little child to whom
Warder Martin gave the biscuits, the child was
crying with hunger on Tuesday morning, and
utterly unable to eat the bread and water served
to it for its breakfast. Martin went out after
the breakfasts had been served, and bought the
few sweet biscuits for the child rather than see
it starving. It was a beautiful action on his
part, and was so recognised by the child, who.

THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 131

utterly unconscious of the regulation of the
Prison Boards told one of the senior warders
how kind this junior warder had been to
him. The result was, of course, a report and
a dismissal.

I know Martin extremely well, and I was
under his charge for the last seven weeks of
my imprisonment. On his appointment at
Reading he had charge of Gallery C, in which
I was confined, so I saw him constantly. I was
struck by the singular kindness and humanity
of the way in which he spoke to me and to the
other prisoners. Kind words are much in
prison, and a pleasant 'Good-morning' or
'Good-evening' will make one as happy as
one can be in a prison. He was always gentle
and considerate. I happen to know another
case in which he showed great kindness to
one of the prisoners, and I have no hesitation
in mentioning it. One of the most horrible
things in prison is the badness of the sanitary
arrangements. No prisoner is allowed under
any circumstances to leave his cell after half-
past five P.M. If, consequently, he is suffering

132 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

from diarrhoea^ he has to use his cell as a latrine,
and pass the night in a most fetid and unwhole-
some atmosphere. Some days before my release
Martin was going the rounds at half-past seven
with one of the senior warders for the purpose
of collecting the oakum and tools of the
prisoners. A man just convicted, and suffering
from violent diarrhoea in consequence of the
food, as is always the case, asked the senior
warder to allow him to empty the slops in his
cell on account of the horrible odour of the cell
and the possibility of illness again in the night.
The senior warder refused absolutely; it was
against the rules. The man had to pass the
night in this dreadful condition. Martin, how-
ever, rather than see this wretched man in such
a loathsome predicament, said he would empty
the man's slops himself, and did so. A warder
emptying a prisoner's slops is, of course, against
the rules, but Martin did this act of kindness
to the man out of the simple humanity of
his nature, and the man was naturally most
grateful.

As regards the children, a great deal has been

THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 133

Ulked and written lately about the contaminat-
ing influence of prison on young children.
What is said is quite true. A child is utterly
contaminated by prison life. But the con-
taminating influence is not that of the prisoners.
It is that of the whole prison system — of the
governor, the chaplain, the warders, the lonely
cell, the isolation, the revolting food, the rules
of the Prison Commissioners, the mode of
discipline, as it is termed, of the life. Every
care is taken to isolate a child from the sight
even of all prisoners over sixteen years of age.
Children sit behind a curtain in chapel, and are
sent to take exercise in small sunless yards —
sometimes a stone-yard, sometimes a yard at the
back of the mills — rather than that they should
see the elder prisoners at exercise. But the
only really humanising influence in prison is the
influence of the prisoners. Their cheerfulness
under terrible circumstances, their sympathy for
each other, their humility, their gentleness,
their pleasant smiles of greeting when they
meet each other, their complete acquiescence
in their punishments, are all quite wonderful.

134 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

and I myself learned many sound lessons from
them. I am not proposing that the children
should not sit behind a curtain in chapel, or
that they should take exercise in a comer of
the common yard. I am merely pointing out
that the bad influence on children is not, and
could never be, that of the prisoners, but is,
and will always remain, that of the prison
system itself. There is not a single man in
Reading Gaol that would not gladly have done
the three children's punishment for them. When
I saw them last it was on the Tuesday following
their conviction. I was taking exercise at half-
past eleven with about twelve other men, as the
three children passed near us^ in charge of a
warder, from the damp, dreary stone-yard in
which they had been at their exercise. I saw
the greatest pity and sympathy in the eyes
of my companions as they looked at them.
Prisoners are, as a class, extremely kind and
sympathetic to each other. Suffering and the
community of suffering makes people kind, and
day after day as I tramped the yard I used to
feel with pleasure and comfort what Carlyle

THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 136

calls somewhere 'the silent rhythmic charm of
human companionship.' In this^ as in all other
things, philanthropists and people of that kind
are astray. It is not the prisoners who need
reformation. It is the prisons.

Of course no child under fourteen years of
age should be sent to prison at all. It is
an absurdity, and, like many absurdities^ of
absolutely tragic results. If, however, they
are to be sent to prison, during the daytime
they should be in a workshop or schoolroom
with a warder. At night they should sleep in
a dormitory, with a night-warder to look after
them. They should be allowed exercise for at
least three hours a day. The dark, badly
ventilated, ill-smelling prison cells are dreadful
for a child, dreadful indeed for any one. One
is always breathing bad air in prison. The food
given to children should consist of tea and
bread-and-butter and soup. Prison soup is
very good and wholesome. A resolution of
the House of Commons could settle the treat-
ment of children in half an hour. I hope you
will use your influence to have this done. The

136 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

way that children are treated at present is really
an outrage on humanity and common sense. It
comes from stupidity.

Let me draw attention now to another terrible
thing that goes on in English prisons, indeed
in prisons all over the world where the system
of silence and cellular confinement is practised.
I refer to the large number of men who become
insane or weak-minded in prison. In convict
prisons this is, of course, quite common ; but in
ordinary gaols also, such aa that I was confined
in, it is to be found.

About three months ago I noticed amongst
the prisoners who took exercise with me a
young man who seemed to me to be silly or
half-witted. Every prison, of course, has its
half-witted clients, who return again and again,
and may be said to live in the prison. But this
young man struck me as being more than
usually half-witted on account of his silly grin
and idiotic laughter to himself, and the peculiar
restlessness of his eternally twitching hands.
He was noticed by all the other prisoners on
account of the strangeness of his conduct.

TIIE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 137

From time to time he did not appear at
exercise, which showed me that he was being
punished by confinement to his cell. Finally, I
discovered that he was under observation, and
being watched night and day by warders. When
he did appear at exercise he always seemed
hysterical, and used to walk round crying or
laughing. At chapel he had to sit right under
the observation of two warders, who carefully
watched him all the time. Sometimes he would
bury his head in his hands, an offence against
the chapel regulations, and his head would be
immediately struck up by a warder so that he
should keep his eyes fixed permanently in the
direction of the Communion-table. Sometimes
he would cry — not making any disturbance —
but with tears streaming down his &ce and an
hysterical throbbing in the throat. Sometimes
he would grin idiot-like to himself and make
faces. He was on more than one occasion sent
out of chapel to his cell, and of course he was
continually punished. As the bench on which
I used to sit in chapel was directly behind the
bench at the end of which this unfortunate man

138 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

was placed I had full opportunity of observing
him. I also saw him^ of course, at exercise
continually, and I saw that he was becoming
insane, and was being treated as if he was
shamming.

On Saturday week last I was in my cell at
about one o'clock occupied in cleaning and
polishing the tins I had been using for dinner.
Suddenly I was startled by the prison silence
being broken by the most horrible and revolting
shrieks, or rather howls, for at first I thought
some animal like a bull or a cow was being
unskilfully slaughtered outside the prison walls.
I soon realised, however, that the howls pro-
ceeded from the basement of the prison, and I
knew that some wretched man was being
flogged. I need not say how hideous and
terrible it was for me, and I began to wonder
who it was who was being punished in this
revolting manner. Suddenly it dawned upon
me that they might be flogging this unfortunate
lunatic. My feelings on the subject need not
be chronicled; they have nothmg to do with
the question.

THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 139

The next day, Sunday l6th, I saw the poor
fellow at exercise, his weak, ugly, wretched face
bloated by tears and hysteria almost beyond
recognition. He walked in the centre ring
along w^ith the old men, the beggars, and the
lame people, so that I was able to observe him
the whole time. It was my last Sunday in
prison, a perfectly lovely day, the finest day
we had had the whole year, and there, in the
beautiful sunlight, walked this poor creature —
made once in the image of God — grinning like
an ape, and making with his hands the most
fantastic gestures, as though he was playing in
the air on some invisible stringed instrument, or
arranging and dealing counters in some curious
game. All the while these hysterical tears,
without which none of us ever saw him, were
making soiled runnels on his white swollen
face. The hideous and deliberate grace of his
gestures made him like an antic. He was
a living grotesque. The other prisoners all
watched him, and not one of them smiled.
Everybody knew what had happened to him,
and that he was bein^ driven insane — was

140 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

insane already. After half an hour he was
ordered in by the warder, and I suppose
punished. At least he was not at exercise on
Monday, though I think I caught sight of him
at the comer of the stone-yard, walking in
charge of a warder.

On the Tuesday — my last day in prison — I
saw him at exercise. He was worse than before,
and again was sent in. Since then I know
nothing of him, but I found out from one of
the prisoners who walked with me at exercise
that he had had twenty-four lashes in the cook-
house on Saturday afternoon, by order of the
visiting justices on the report of the doctor.
The howls that had horrified us all were his.

This man is undoubtedly becoming insane.
Prison doctors have no knowledge of mental
disease of any kind. Tliey are as a class
ignorant men. The pathology of the mind is
unknown to them. When a man grows insane,
they treat hira as shamming. They have him
punished again and again. Naturally the man
becomes worse. When ordinary punishments
are exhausted, the doctor reports the case to

THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 141

the justices. The result is flogging. Of course
the flogging is not done with a cat-of-nine-tails.
It is what is called birching. The instrument
is a rod; but the result on the wretched half-
witted man may be imagined.

His number is, or was, A. 2.11. I also
managed to find out his name. It is Prince.
Something should be done at once for him.
He is a soldier, and his sentence is one of
court-martial. The term is six months. Three
have yet to run.

May I ask you to use your influence to have
this case examined into, and to see that the
lunatic prisoner is properly treated ?

No report by the Medical Commissioners is of
any avail. It is not to be trusted. The medical
inspectors do not seem to understand the differ-
ence between idiocy and lunacy — between the
entire absence of a function or organ and the
diseases of a function or organ, lliis man
A. 2.11 will, I have no doubt, be able to tell
his name, the nature of his offence, the day of
the month, the date of the beginning and
expiration of his sentence, and answer any

142 THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN

ordinary simple question; but that his mind is
diseased admits of no doubt. At present it is
a horrible duel between himself and the doctor.
The doctor is fighting for a theory. The man
is fighting for his life. I am anxious that the
man should win. But let the whole case be
examined into by experts who understand brain-
disease, and by people of humane feelings who
have still some common sense and some pity.
There is no reason that the sentimentalist should
be asked to interfere. He always does harm.

The case is a special instance of the cruelty
inseparable from a stupid system, for the present
Governor of Reading is a man of gentle and
humane character, greatly liked and respected
by all the prisoners. He was appointed in July
last, and though he cannot alter the rules of the
prison system he has altered the spirit in which
they used to be carried out under his prede-
cessor. He is very popular with the prisoners
and with the warders. Indeed he has quite
altered the whole tone of the prison life. Upon
the other hand, the system is, of course, beyond
his reach as far as altering its rules is concerned.

THE CASE OF WARDER MARTIN 143

I have no doubt that he sees daily much of
what he knows to be unjust, stupid, and cruel.
But his hands are tied. Of course I have no
knowledge of his real views of the case of A.
2.11, nor, indeed, of his views on our present
system. I merely judge him by the complete
change he brought about in Reading Prison.
Under his predecessor the system was carried
out with the greatest harshness and stupidity. —
I remain. Sir, your obedient servant,

Oscar Wilde
if aj/ 27,

II. Prison Reform*

THE EDITOR OF THE 'DAILY CHRONICLE.*

SI R, — I understand that the Home Secretary's
Prison Reform Bill is to be read this week
for the first or second time, and as your journal
has been the one paper in England that has
taken a real and vital interest in this important
question, I hope that you will allow me, as one
who has had long personal experience of life in
an English gaol, to point out what reforms in
our present stupid and barbarous system are
urgently necessary.

From a leading article that appeared in your
columns about a week ago, I learn that the chief
reform proposed is an increase in the number of
inspectors and official visitors, that are to have
access to our English prisons.

Such a reform as this is entirely useless.

1 March 24, 1898.
144

PRISON REFORM 145

The reason is extremely simple. The inspectors
and justices of the peace that visit prisons come
there for the purpose of seeing that the prison
regulations are duly carried out. They come
for no other purpose, nor have they any power,
even if they had the desire, to alter a single
clause in the regulations. No prisoner has ever
had the smallest relief, or attention, or care from
any of the official visitors. The visitors arrive
not to help the prisoners, but to see that the
rules are carried out. Their object in coming
is to ensure the enforcement of a foolish and
inhuman code. And, as they must have some
occupation, they take very good care to do it. A
prisoner w^ho has been allowed the smallest
privilege dreads the arrival of the inspectors.
And on the day of any prison inspection the
prison officials are more than usually brutal to the
prisoners. Their object is, of course, to show
the splendid discipline they maintain.

The necessary reforms are very simple. They
concern the needs of the body and the needs
of the mind of each unfortunate prisoner.

With regard to the first, there are three

K

146 PRISON REFORM

permanent punishments authorised by law in
English prisons : —

1. Hunger.

2. Insomnia.

3. Disease.

The food supplied to prisoners is entirely
inadequate. Most of it is revolting in character.
All of it is insufficient. Every prisoner suffers
day and night from hunger. A certain amount
of food is carefully weighed out ounce by ounce
for each prisoner. It is just enough to sustain,
not life exactly, but existence. But one is
always racked by the pain and sickness of
hunger.

The result of the food — which in most cases
consists of weak gruel, suet, and water — is
disease in the form of incessant diarrhoea. This
malady, which ultimately with most prisoners
becomes a permanent disease, is a recognised
institution in every prison. At Wandsworth
Prison, for instance — where I was confined for
two months, till I had to be carried into hospital,
where I remained for another two months — the
warders go round twice or three times a day

PRISON REFORM 147

with astringent medicines, which they serve out
to the prisoners as a matter of course. After
about a week of such treatment it is unnecessary
to say that the medicine produces no effect at
all. The wretched prisoner is then left a prey
to the most weakening, depressing, and humili-
ating malady that can be conceived : and if, as
often happens, he fails, from physical weakness,
to complete his required revolutions at the crank
or the mill he is reported for idleness, and
punished with the greatest severity and
brutality. Nor is this all.

Nothing can be worse than the sanitary
arrangements of English prisons. In old days
each cell was provided with a form of latrine.
These latrines have now been suppressed. They
exist no longer. A small tin vessel is supplied
to each prisoner instead. Three times a day a
prisoner is allowed to empty his slops. But he
is not allowed to have access to the prison lava-
tories, except during the one hour when he is at
exercise. And after five o'clock in the evening
he is not allowed to leave his cell under any
pretence, or for any reason. A man suffering

148 PRISON REFORM

from diarrhoea is consequently placed in a posi-
tion so loathsome that it is unnecessary to dwell
on it, that it would be unseemly to dwell on it.
The misery and tortures that prisoners go
through in consequence of the revolting sanitary
arrangements are quite indescribable. And the
foul air of the prison cells, increased by a system
of ventilation that is utterly ineffective, is so
sickening and unwholesome that it is no uncom-
mon thing for warders, when they come in the
morning out of the fresh air and open and
inspect each cell, to be violently sick. I have
seen this myself on more than three occasions,
and several of the warders have mentioned it to
me as one of the disgusting things that their
office entails on them.

The food supplied to prisoners should be
adequate and wholesome. It should not be of
such a character as to produce the incessant
diarrhoea that, at first a malady, becomes a per-
manent disease.

The sanitary arrangements in English prisons
should be entirely altered. Every prisoner
should be allowed to have access to the lava-

PRISON REFORM 149

tories when necessary, and to empty his slops
when necessary. The present system of ventila-
tion in each cell is utterly useless. The air
comes through choked-up gratings, and through
a small ventilator in the tiny barred window,
which is far too small, and too badly con-
structed, to admit any adequate amount of fresh
air. One is only allowed out of one's cell for
one hour out of the twenty-four that com-
pose the long day, and so for twenty-three
hours one is breathing the foulest possible
air.

With regard to the punishment of insomnia,
it only exists in Chinese and in English prisons.
In China it is inflicted by placing the prisoner in
a small bamboo cage ; in England by means of
the plank bed. The object of the plank bed
is to produce insomnia. There is no other
object in it, and it invariably succeeds. And
even when one is subsequently allowed a hard
mattress, as happens in the course of imprison-
ment, one still suffers from insomnia. For sleep,
like all wholesome things, is a habit. Every
prisoner who has been on a plank bed suffers

180 PRISON REFORM

from insomnia. It is a revolting and ignorant
punishment.

With regard to the needs of the mind, I
beg that you will allow me to say some-
thing.

The present prison system seems almost to
have for its aim the wrecking and the destruc-
tion of the mental faculties. The production of
insanity is, if not its object, certainly its result.
That is a well-ascertained fact. Its causes are
obvious. Deprived of books, of all human in-
tercourse, isolated from every humane and
humanising influence, condemned to eternal
silence, robbed of all intercourse with the
external world, treated like an unintelligent
animal, brutalised below the level of any of the
brute creation, the wretched man who is confined
in an English prison can hardly escape becoming
insane. I do not wish to dwell on these
horrors; still less to excite any momentary
sentimental interest in these matters. So I
will merely, with your permission, point out
what should be done.

Every prisoner should have an adequate supply

PRISON REFORM 161

of good books. At present, during the first
three months of imprisonment, one is allowed
no books at all, except a Bible, Prayer-book, and
hymn-book. After that one is allowed one book
a week. That is not merely inadequate^ but
the books that compose an ordinary prison
library are perfectly useless. They consist
chiefly of third-rate, badly written, religious
books, so-called, written apparently for children,
and utterly unsuitable for children or for any one
else. Prisoners should be encouraged to read,
and should have whatever books they want, and
the books should be well chosen. At present
the selection of books is made by the prison
chaplain.

Under the present system a prisoner is only
allowed to see his friends four times a year, for
twenty minutes each time. This is quite wrong.
A prisoner should be allowed to see his friends
once a month, and for a reasonable time. The
mode at present in vogue of exhibiting a
prisoner to his friends should be altered.
Under the present system the prisoner is either
locked up in a large iron cage or in a large

152 PRISON REFORM

wooden box, with a small aperture, covered with
wire netting, through which he is allowed to
peer. His friends are placed in a similar cage,
some three or four feet distant, and two warders
stand between to listen to, and, if they wish,
stop or interrupt the conversation, such as it may
be. I propose that a prisoner should be allowed
to see his relatives or friends in a room. The
present regulations are inexpressibly revolting
and harassing. A visit from (our) relatives or
friends is to every prisoner an intensification of
humiliation and mental distress. Many prisoners,
rather than support such an ordeal, refuse to see
their friends at all. And I cannot say I am sur-
prised. When one sees one's solicitor, one sees
him in a room with a glass door, on the other
side of which stands the warder. When a man
sees his wife and children, or his parents, or his
friends, he should be allowed the same privilege.
To be exhibited, like an ape in a cage, to people
who are fond of one, and of whom one is fond,
is a needless and horrible degradation.

Every prisoner should be allowed to write
and receive a letter at least once a month. At

PRISON REFORM 163

present one is allowed to write only four times
a year. This is quite inadequate. One of the
tragedies of prison life is that it turns a man's
heart to stone. The feelings of natural affec-
tion, like all other feelings, require to be fed.
They die easily of inanition. A brief letter,
four times a year, is not enough to keep alive
the gentler and more humane affections by
which ultimately the nature is kept sensitive to
any fine or beautiful influences that may heal a
wrecked and ruined life.

The habit of mutilating and expurgating
prisoners' letters should be stopped. At pre-
sent, if a prisoner in a letter makes any com-
plaint of the prison system, that portion of his
letter is cut out with a pair of scissors. If,
upon the other hand, he makes any complaint
when he speaks to his friends through the bars
of the cage, or the aperture of the wooden
box, he is brutalised by the warders, and re-
ported for punishment every week till his next
visit comes round, by which time he is expected
to have learned, not wisdom, but cunning, and
one always learns that. It is one of the few

164 PRISON REFORM

things that one does learn in prison. Fortun-
ately, the other things are, in some instances, of
higher import.

If I may trespass for a little longer, may I say
this ? You suggested in your leading article
that no prison chaplain should be allowed to
have any care or employment outside the priscm
itself. But this is a matter of no moment.
The prison chaplains are entirely useless. They
are, as a class, well-meaning, but foolish, indeed
silly, men. They are of no help to any prisoner.
Once every six weeks or so a key turns in the
lock of one's cell door, and the chaplain enters.
One stands, of course, at attention. He asks
one whether one has been reading the Bible.
One answers ' Yes ' or ' No,' as the case may be.
He then quotes a few texts, and goes out and
locks the door. Sometimes he leaves a tract.

The officials who should not be allowed to
hold any employment outside the prison, or to
have any private practice, are the prison doctors.
At present the prison doctors have usually, if
not always, a large private practice, and hold
appointments in other institutions. The conse-

PRISON REFORM 155

qiience is that the health of the prisoners is
entirely neglected, and the sanitary condition
of the prison entirely overlooked. As a class, I
regard, and have always from my earliest youth
regarded, doctors as by far the most humane
profession in the community. But I must make
an exception for prison doctors. They are, as
far as I came across them, and from what I saw
of them in hospital and elsewhere, brutal in
manner, coarse in temperament, and utterly in-
different to the health of the prisoners or their
comfort. If prison doctors were prohibited from
private practice they would be compelled to
take some interest in the health and sanitary
condition of the people under their charge. I
have tried to indicate in my letter a few of the
reforms necessary to our English prison system.
They are simple, practical, and humane. They
are, of course, only a beginning. But it is time
that a beginning should be made, and it can
only be started by a strong pressure of public
opinion formularised in your powerful paper, and
fostered by it.

But to make even these reforms effectual,

156 PRISON REFORM

much has to be done. And the first, and per-
haps the most difficult task is to humanise the
governors of prisons, to civilise the warders and
to Christianise the chaplains. — Yours, etc..

The Author of the ' Ballad

OF Reading Gaol '
March 23.

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press

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